5 Miracle Drugs That Turned Out to Be Anything But

5 Thalidomide

In the 1950s, women across the world were led to believe that they’d found a great new drug to stave off morning sickness: thalidomide. Unfortunately, none of them were told that thalidomide had a side effect that should have been completely disqualifying. 

This drug that was being prescribed specifically to pregnant women caused severe physical deformities in their children. If they’d known, I highly doubt any future mom would have considered a child with short, flipper-like limbs (if they survived at all) a fair exchange for settling their stomach. Before the link was revealed, 10,000 children worldwide were born with deformities thanks to thalidomide, and an estimated 123,000 more never made it out of the womb. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of it, thalidomide never hit the U.S. that hard thanks to Frances Oldham Kelsey at the FDA, who refused to approve the drug and thought its claims of safety seemed suspect.

4 Heroin

If a doctor gives you a prescription for heroin, that’s probably not a doctor. It’s just a man who found a lab coat and set up a fake office in an abandoned building. It’s not even a name most people associate with actual pharmaceuticals whatsoever. “Heroin” is not, however, some term that came about as slang on the street, but a bona fide brand name for a drug originally distributed by Bayer.

Bayer had discovered a way to modify morphine to make it more easily consumable, a product they called heroin. It was prescribed to patients not as a painkiller, but as a cough suppressant, especially for persistent coughs associated with things like tuberculosis. Despite its efficacy, doctors quickly grew uncomfortable with the drug, because their patients really liked it, coughs aside. It was, as everyone now knows, extremely addictive, caused heavy physical dependency, and those taking it constantly needed to up their dose as their tolerance grew. For a minute, though, they really showed those persistent coughs.

3 Laudanum

If the straightforward opiates contained in something like heroin didn’t carry enough of a kick for you, you might have been happier with laudanum. A medically-approved pharmaceutical cocktail — and I mean cocktail in the most literal sense — because laudanum was a combination of opium and alcohol. What did it cure? What didn’t it cure, if your measure of success is how much the patient cared about their sickness after imbibing it.

It’s much older than either previous entry, with opium obviously existing for full millennia even before the alchemist Paracelsus had the idea to mix it with alcohol in the 16th century. I doubt I have to explain how regular doses of high-proof opium could prove dangerous. This is the reason you should think twice about medicines invented by guys who have a jar full of blood, sperm and horse feces sitting in their lab.

2 Calomel

Calomel can give laudanum a run for its money in terms of the inexplicably long period it was considered something you should actually give someone. It was prescribed for all sorts of things: parasites, constipation, even in powdered form meant to be rubbed on infants’ gums to soothe teething pain.

Whether it actually worked for any of these purposes is irrelevant, because you were getting something a whole lot worse as a silent passenger — mainly because calomel is a substance you're already familiar with: mercury. Whatever help it might have provided was probably forgotten when you came down with mercury poisoning as a result. It’s particularly sad in the case of calomel teething powder, which mothers would happily gum bumps of into their babies’ mouths, only to be confused and heartbroken when those babies became violently ill.

1 Lobotomies

Not a “drug” per se, but that only makes it all the more horrific. You can explain away prescribing mercury or opium with a general lack of chemical knowledge, but it should be common sense that turning a portion of someone’s brain into synapse smoothie isn’t a viable cure to anything. Nevertheless, it was once thought to be the miracle cure for mental illness. In particular, one vile man named Walter Freeman, who was responsible for both popularizing the lobotomy in the U.S. and performing more than 200 of them, including on John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary.

If you’re unfamiliar with the procedure, Freeman’s version involved inserting an icepick-like tool through the eye socket above the eye to effectively destroy the frontal lobe of the patient. The effects? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but damaging the brain results in symptoms of brain damage. And so, subjects would usually be left with severely limited mental capacity. 

Genius, Dr. Freeman, genius!