The Pill That Promised Sleep

This episode tells the dark history of thalidomide, a drug once marketed as a safe sedative and morning sickness remedy before it was linked to severe birth defects around the world. Sold with the confidence of modern medicine, it became one of the most infamous pharmaceutical disasters of the twentieth century. In under three minutes, the episode asks what happens when trust, advertising, and weak safety testing enter the body of a child not yet born.