Honorable Tranki

The Japanese are a highly emotional people, they love to take pills, and they like to imitate Western customs. These factors create a rich market for tranquilizers. Last week Tokyo's Welfare Ministry reported that in 1957 the Japanese went wild for "tranki," poured out yen to the tune of $3.5 million for meprobamate alone. They were buying tranki without prescription at any handy drugstore, and swallowing them under the nerve-racking prodding of a hypertonic advertising campaign.

The tranki rage struck Japan with typhoon force in the fall of 1956, when the U.S.'s Lederle Laboratories joined Takeda Pharmaceutical in a fifty-fifty deal to set up Lederle Ltd. as an outlet for meprobamate (best known in the U.S. by its original brand name, Miltown). But no patent claim had been filed, and the vacuum was quickly filled by Japan's highly competitive drugmakers--concentrated on a narrow street called Doshomachi in Osaka, around a shrine of Yakusoshin (an ancient god of drugs). By December, Daiichi Seiyaku was on the market with its own brand of meprobamate, called Atraxin. Lederle Ltd. put out Miltown. Takeda competed with its own corporate offshoot by pushing Harmonin.

Daiichi Seiyaku (meaning No. 1 drug company) ran half-page ads showing men and women with agonized faces, clutching swollen heads and moaning for Atraxin. Daiichi and competitors put up billboards at Tokyo's busiest intersections, where stalled motorists and scared-running pedestrians were urged to help themselves to "cope" by taking a pill. There was even a suggestion (eventually dropped) that similar ads be placed at railroad crossings, bridges and volcano craters, the meccas of the suicide-minded. (Several attempts to commit suicide with overdoses of tranquilizers have failed.) Tranki pills have proved especially popular with students cramming to pass the tough exams for government jobs.

There are already 15 brand names under which meprobamate is being sold, with applications pending for 65 more. Atraxin leads the field with 1957 sales of $1,250,000; next comes Harmonin, then Equanil; the old original Miltown is fourth. It is priced at ten tablets for 83 -c-; most home-grown Japanese brands are twelve tablets for 56-c-, but they are only half as potent. Osaka manufacturers have tried to convince consumers that "because Japanese are smaller and weigh less than Westerners, they need only a half-size tranki." Then, working both sides of the street, they blandly urge buyers to take two tablets, three or four times a day. Some go so far as to say, "Take as many as you want, any time you have worries."

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