Happy fluoxetine day!!
Something I drew up last year for the anniversary but never posted here. 49 years ago today, compound LY-110140 was given the name fluoxetine. After that, it would be 12 more years before it was finally FDA approved in December of 1987 and subsequently sold on US shelves in January of 1988 (that long ass time span is a whole other can of incredibly interesting worms).
I chose film imagery for this piece as a reference to Prozac’s ‘blockbuster drug’ status, of which nearly everyone was taken off guard by it achieving. No one had high expectations for fluoxetine, even those who developed it in the first place. An antidepressant that acted specifically on the serotonin system could never survive in a world where the current antidepressants, like MAOIs and TCAs, acted on multiple systems, and yet Prozac became a national sensation.
What followed massive success was an outcry that only seemed to get louder as time went on, as the potential dangers of the drug were not being properly communicated or warned about. People were dying, committing suicide. Data was covered up, falsified, never released. The court cases lasted years as people fought pharmaceutical giants in search of retribution. I could talk forever about how interesting Prozac’s history is in particular, and how every other SSRI ties so closely into its story (which, if you want to read, I highly reccomend Let Them Eat Prozac by David Healy, my absolutely favorite book ever I read it over and over).
Next year will be the 50th anniversary of fluoxetine’s official name, and I could not be more excited about that
