From King Kong Pills to Mother’s Little Helpers—Career Cycles of Two Families of Psychotropic Drugs: The Barbiturates and Benzodiazepines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article compares the careers of two families of 20th-century psychotropic drugs, the barbiturates and the benzodiazepines, in five different countries. Both families of drugs were used as so-called hypnotics and sedatives, and later as minor tranquillizers. In addition these drugs were extensively used as self-medication. The careers show a cyclical temporal course and generally encompass three phases: first, an expanding use of the drugs, accompanied by high expectations; then, rising criticism and disappointment; and finally contracting use and limited application. These phases need not have been sequential: they often overlapped. The cycle sometimes ended by the disappearance of the drug from mental health care, only to be replaced by new drugs with a profile of promise and hope. These cycles, which we term Seige cycles, are generally typical for the careers of psychotropic drugs. The analytical concept of the Seige cycle facilitates a comparative perspective on the commonalities as well as the differences between the various drug careers under consideration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".