Business: Psychoprofits

Tranquilizer under stress

Students take the pills to suppress exam-time jitters, and actors pop them to relieve stage fright. Lonely housewives rely on them to get through empty days, and narcotics addicts use them to counter withdrawal symptoms. Valium, the ubiquitous tranquilizer that has been on the market for 17 years, has also benefited its developer, Switzerland's F. Hoffmann-La Roche & Co. It remains the world's largest selling prescription drug; in the U.S., which accounts for some 40% of Roche's $1.4 billion pharmaceutical sales, doctors write 44 million prescriptions for it each year.

Roche, whose total revenues of about $3 billion include a big business in vitamins, is only the fourth largest prescription drugmaker. But it is tops in psycho-pharmaceuticals, or mind drugs, thanks chiefly to Valium and its predecessor Librium. Yet today Roche is suffering its own headaches. Valium's success, says a Roche spokesman, "was too good to last. The reaction was bound to come."

In Europe, Roche has problems with its pricing practices. In West Germany, charges are pending that the company has used its dominance in mind drugs to hold the price of Valium excessively high; while a package of 20 10-mg pills sells for $5.25 in West Germany, the cost is 30% lower in Britain, where a similar antimonopoly case was brought against Roche in 1973. In the U.S., where Valium prices are often even higher than in West Germany, concern is growing about the broad use of such tranquilizers; the issue was most recently spotlighted in hearings held last September by Presidential Hopeful Edward Kennedy's Senate health subcommittee.

Valium and similar antianxiety drugs are commonly prescribed to relieve symptoms of stress. Normally, they yield a feeling of relaxation without inducing marked sleepiness, as barbiturates and alcohol may do. They are derived from benzodiazepine, a chemical whose tension-reducing qualities were discovered by scientists at Roche's U.S. laboratory in Nutley, N.J. While the precise working of the drug remains a mystery, it is known that about 20 minutes after a Valium pill is swallowed, the drug reaches tiny receptors located in the brain's emotion control centers, where it has a calming effect on the central nervous system that may last several hours.

At the Senate hearings, experts said that Valium and other so-called minor tranquilizers may produce bad side effects. They may cause confusion and temporary memory loss, especially among people over 60. Habitual users risk what Kennedy called a "nightmare of dependence," or outright addiction. Roche officials concede that Valium can be habit-forming, but insist that most people who claim to be hooked on it have actually been addicted to alcohol or other drugs. They also say that U.S. doctors prescribe tranquilizers too casually; though Western Europe's population is greater than the U.S.'s, American physicians prescribe Valium twice as often as European doctors do.