Songfacts®:

• This song is about the hypocrisy that comes with attitudes about drugs, especially in America. At the time, marijuana was very illegal and could land you jail for years, but pharmaceutical drugs like Prozac, which were often far more powerful, were foisted on the public by drug companies eager to boost their earnings.
• Drugs are a hot topic in many Queens Of The Stone Age songs, which got them tagged as a "stoner rock" band. The Rated R album opens with a song called "Feel Good Hit Of The Summer," with a lyric that is literally just a list of various drugs. So you might think the band is championing drug culture, but it's far more nuanced. Frontman Josh Homme considers "Better Living Through Chemistry" an anti-drug song, taking a look at how people are manipulated into taking prescription medications.
• The phrase "Better Living Through Chemistry" is a variation on the DuPont slogan "Better Things For Better Living... Through Chemistry." The chemical company was pushing its products as panaceas in the 1940s and 1950s, but they often came at a cost. The most notorious example is Teflon, a non-stick coating that made cleaning up the dinner dishes a breeze, but ended up having serious health risks (this is discussed in detail in the Netflix documentary The Devil We Know). By using the slogan as the song title, Queens Of The Stone Age are drawing an apt comparison to pharmaceuticals, which promise magical cures with no effort on the part of the user, but often have serious side effects that manifest later on.
• Josh Homme and bass player Nick Oliveri were the primary creatives on the Rated R album and wrote this song together (Homme sings lead). It was one of the songs they wrote on an excursion to Twentynine Palms, California, near Joshua Tree National Park in the Mojave Desert.
  
  "we went there with the idea of, 'We need to finish writing a record. We've got six more songs to write,'" Oliveri said in a Songfacts interview. "We came up with 'Better Living Through Chemistry,' 'I Think I Lost My Headache,' and things like that. Josh would have this cool initial riff, like say 'Better Living Through Chemistry,' and I'd come up with this bass thing and add a bridge to it. But the verse and chorus was Josh. I added a jam part to it and I think I added a pretty cool bassline to it."
• This song, along with the rest of the Rated R album, was recorded at Sound City studios in Los Angeles, where Nirvana made Nevermind. Dave Grohl, who played drums on the next Queens Of The Stone Age album, Songs For The Deaf, made a documentary about the studio (featuring Josh Homme) that was released in 2013.