New York, New York: The Cover Story So Good They Wrote It Twice

Earlier this week I got a kick out of Gawker's post about Lisa Miller's cover story for New York, "Xanax: A Love Story." Filed under "Fake Trends," blogger Hamilton Nolan "gently pointed out" that the story was meaningless, thanks to its underlying premise that Xanax is "somehow something new, something especially of the moment, as if Xanax use has just now reached the cultural peak at which it becomes suitable for a work of splashy zeitgeist journalism."

No sooner did I forget about it did I happen to clean out a basket of magazines I have in my living room, which rather than overflowing has (apparently) acted as a library for about two-dozen old issues, only a few of which were saved on purpose. What jumped out at me, of course, was the June 9, 2003, cover of New York, featuring Ariel Levy's story, "Self-Medicated City: What Are You On?" In it, we hear lots of things like "One thing led to the next, and soon everyone at the table was talking about how they’re on Xanax or Klonopin or Vicodin ..." and “Somebody gave me a mother lode of Xanax ...” and “My dealer sells Xanax and Valium along with coke and ketamine and ecstasy ... ” and "unlike benzodiazepines (drugs like Ativan, Valium, and the ever-popular Xanax), Ambien can knock you unconscious in twenty minutes flat. ..." (I could go on.)

Amused by the coincidence that I'd saved this particular magazine, I started thinking how much Hamilton would have enjoyed having the article handy when he wrote his blog post. But then I remembered that was the whole point -- he didn't even need it. If someone would like to go through the two pieces with a fine-tooth comb to figure out what exactly has changed in nine years, please be my guest. I'm too strung out on prescription meds to be bothered.