The drugging of babies continued in Britain at least,  a pharmacist friend 
whose baby was around the same age as my son told me in a discussion  of 
sleep we were having [about 23 years ago] that  when she was newly qualified 
that lots of  mothers used to come in and get phenergan for their babies to 
get them to sleep,  but that fewer did   at that time.  I had never heard of 
it and was horrified.   It was suggested to  me to  a friend's wife a year 
later for help with teething - she'd used it with hers,  one of which was 
younger than my son.  Maybe mothers still use it but  not so openly.
just done a quick google on it and found this 2009 leaflet from the BMJ 
where it is suggested.  Despite the claim that it is based on  the  most up 
to date research there is not a single reference on the leaflet.

Helen Butler
LLL Leader in England
Dosing babies and drugging them to the eyeballs is not new, as you will
> know.  In England in the 19th century, it used to be opiates, most 
> "soothing
> syrups" having consisted of laudanum and syrup.  They were used for
> "soothing", including during teething, for "colic", and in the belief that
> it would strengthen the heart of a sickly baby.  For the poor, when work 
> was
> scarce in the 1830s, laudanum was cheaper than bread for quieting hungry
> children.  Queen Victoria's "surgeon-accoucher" (obstetrician) included in
> his advice to Prince Albert for the royal nursery warnings about making 
> sure
> the nursemaids, often country girls, didn't administer these soothing 
> syrups
> to the royal babies.(1)  Opiates were used for babies, especially sick 
> ones,
> in the previous century, by doctors such as Erasmus Darwin.(2) As late as
> the early 20th-century, advice for mothers sometimes mentioned avoiding
> dosing with opiates.
>
> In the 19th and early-20th centuries, alcohol was an ingredient of colic
> drops and cough medicines.  In fact, as late as the 1960s, a Queensland
> newspaper ran a report about older women who had hidden alcohol problems,
> going from pharmacy to pharmacy to buy a particular brand of cough 
> mixture,
> so as not to buy it at the one place and rouse suspicion.
>
> With "soothing" a very popular word in relation to babies at the moment, 
> it
> is no surprise that commercial interests are finding new ways to promote 
> the
> same idea.  Sleep and babies was a selling point in advertisements for 
> many
> artificial feeding products and complementary foods marketed to infants 
> (as
> well as to "invalids and the aged") into the 20th century.  Various foods
>were claimed to promote natural sleep in babies, and to lessen the mother's
> fatique, too, if she drank or ate them during pregnancy and lactation.(3)
>
> It is unfortunate that the term "soothing" has become such strong concept 
> in
> baby care, including for newborns, linked with the implication that the 
> baby
> will be "soothed" out of the mother's arms and in a separate sleep space -
> when what the baby needs is to "graze" at the breast, for comfort and for
> milk.  (My own saying on this, for decades, has been: "If in doubt, 
> FEED.")
>
> Virginia

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