The Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit shows its main character Beth taking green and white pills to help her visualize chess pieces; however, the show never gets into the specifics of what the drug is, and what it was prescribed for. Beth first encounters the pills at the orphanage where she is sent as a child after her mother is killed in an automobile accident. After experimenting with the pills, Beth finds herself reliant on them — a habit she continues into adulthood.
The Queen's Gambit is a critically acclaimed Netflix Original series that is set in the 1950s and 1960s. The show is based on a novel by the same title by Walter Tevis. Both versions of The Queens Gambit examine a period in American history when the world of competitive chess was in its heyday. In real life, the climax of this period was marked by the iconic match between American prodigy Bobby Fischer and Russian World Champion Boris Sky. This same spirit is channeled in The Queen's Gambit, but is set a decade earlier and follows the journey of a female prodigy, whose experience — in some ways — match those of Fischer's.
One key difference between Beth in The Queen's Gambit and Fischer in real life is that Beth struggles with substance abuse. Years after she was first abusing the pills she was istered at the orphanage, Beth again finds herself with access to them when her adoptive mother Alma Wheatley is prescribed the same medication. The teenager rediscovers an appetite for the high it offers, and it acts as a gateway drug to alcohol and other substances. While at the orphanage, Beth is given the tranquilizers with her daily vitamin, but the adults are vague about what she's being given. As a teenager, Beth learns the drug is called xanzolam after she picks up her mother's prescription and recognizes the pills.
There is no real life tranquilizer called "xanzolam," but shows how often such pills were used — the orphans all required to take them to "even their dispositions," and Alma takes them to forget the general malaise of her daily existence.
Beth takes large doses of xanzolam before bed in order to see chess pieces on the ceiling, which allows her to work through strategies. It's unclear in The Queen's Gambit if Beth is hallucinating, or if the drugs simply allow her to unlock her own mental potential. In the novel, her initial use is described not as hallucinatory but a sedative: "It loosened something deep in her stomach and helped her doze away the tense hours in the orphanage." It's that peace that Beth chases throughout the Netflix miniseries, and its only when she's able to conquer that own self-doubt that she's able to master chess while sober. In the end of The Queen's Gambit, Beth is able to visualize the chess pieces without using tranquilizers, which is the true victory in her match against Russian Grandmaster Vasily Borgov.