Frauengold?

 The topic came up this week on a German movie, and my wife asked me the history...so I looked up.

Around the early 1950s (probably just six to eight years after WW II)....this product was approved for sale in West Germany....called Frauengold.

It went out into drug shops, and health food stores.

Sold to mostly women....the point was that it was supposed to be for calming effects. 

Alcohol content?  16.5 percent.

Lets be honest....even before WW I....there were various products out there which were for the same effect, and most had narcotics mixed in.  So this was purely alcohol in nature.

In the mid-1960s....several folks began to test the bottle, and made the judgement that regular alcohol would have been cheaper to buy.....triggering the same effect in mood.  

By 1981.....the West German government finally said 'enough', and banned it (mostly over evidence it actually caused kidney damage, and might trigger cancer).

How many German women were addicted to it?  Unknown. The fact that it was treated more as a over-the-counter-drug, than pure alcohol?  That's one amusing element of this story.  The fact that you could have bought a cheap bottle of vodka for probably half the price and gotten the same effect?     Yeah, that's an issue as well.