## The Placidyl Episode
The specific details of Murphy’s prescription drug dependency and his self-managed withdrawal from it appear in multiple accounts and are part of the documented post-war record.
Placidyl (ethchlorvynol) was a sedative-hypnotic medication prescribed for insomnia in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not, at the time of Murphy’s use, as restricted as it later became; it was a pharmaceutical solution to the problem of insomnia, prescribed by physicians to patients who had difficulty sleeping. For Murphy, whose insomnia was severe enough that he slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow, the prescription was medically reasonable from his physician’s perspective.
The dependency that developed was not unusual for the medication class. Placidyl produced physical dependence with extended use, requiring increasingly large doses to produce the same effect and causing severe withdrawal symptoms when discontinued. The standard medical management of benzodiazepine and related sedative dependency in the 1960s was not as developed as it later became; the specific challenge of managing withdrawal from these medications was not fully understood by the medical establishment.
Murphy’s approach — checking himself into a motel room, stopping the medication, and enduring the withdrawal in isolation — is not recommended medical practice. It was dangerous. Withdrawal from sedative-hypnotics can cause seizures and other life-threatening complications. The fact that he survived it without medical supervision was partly good fortune.
What the episode demonstrates about his character is consistent with the wartime record: when confronted with something that needed to be done, he found a way to do it, without asking for help, often without adequate support, and with less regard for his personal safety than the situation warranted. The same quality that led him to climb onto the burning M10 led him to handle his drug withdrawal in isolation in a motel room. It is not a healthy model; it is a consistent one.