History of Heroin

History of Heroin

In 1898 a German chemical company launched a medicine they called heroin. A hundred years later and we now we have a feared and dangerous street drug. In 1863, Friedrich Bayer (1825-76) started up a factory to use new chemical procedures for producing colorful dyes from coal-tar. And in 1888, a new substance made Bayer chemists became the company’s first commercial medicine.

Synthetic chemicals were something totally new in the 1800’s and early 19^th century. In the early 19^th century medicines had always been using raw materials. For example, medicines like opium which was made from the juice of poppy seed pods.

The first man to apply a chemical process to plant drugs was Friedrich Serturner who purified the main active ingredient of opium which he later gave the name ‘morphium’ and which we now know as morphine. Being able to get morphine and other pure drugs from plants brought success for many entrepreneurs such as Georg Merck, who turned his pharmacy into a major supplier of the new chemical medicines. Morphine was widely and commonly used for pain relief in the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. Back then morphine was used in combination with a hypodermic syringe which had been invented in 1853.

The Making of Heroin

Now that plant derived drugs were now available in modified and purified forms they could be changed into new molecules that could be more effective and even safer for people to use. Heinrich Dreser, who now was the head of the Bayer Company in Eberfeld adopted this strategy to create two of the most famous drugs we know today. The first being heroin, which Dreser made by adding two acetyl groups to the morphine molecule; and the second being salicylic acid derivative which Bayer called ‘Aspirin’.

Heroin On The Market

Heroin took its name from the adjective heroic. Heroin was presented as a cough, chest and lung medicine to the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in 1898. It was meant to help with the pain relief of diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis which were the leading causes of death back then. Back then antibiotics had yet to be discovered and created so the doctors could only prescribe narcotic painkillers to help with the suffering of patients who could not sleep due to breathing and coughing. Heroin was very effective in helping these symptoms.

Today we know heroin to be a potent, fast acting painkiller that surpasses morphine in its effectiveness because it passes from the blood to the brain much easier. Heroin was praised as a miracle drug after its debut and was advertised in German, English, Italian, Russian and other languages all over the world.

Heroin began being prescribed instead of morphine or codeine. The addictive potential of morphine was quite well known and slowly doctors and pharmacists began to figure out that while heroin was an improvement from morphine it was an improvement in this respect.  Those using heroin for medicine slowly found themselves needing more and more of it to get the same pain relieving effects.

The Downfall of Heroin

By 1903, it was finally realized that heroin had become a serious problem. Hundreds of people had been treated for heroin addiction in what was known as demorphisation. The United States was the first country where heroin addiction became a serious problem. By the late 19^th century it was believed that over a quarter of a million Americans were addicted to opium, morphine or cocaine. In 1910, New York’s Bellevue Hospital made its first ever admission for heroin addiction. In 1915, it admitted 425 heroin addicts.

Heroin eventually became a black market substance and one that could only be obtained with a prescription. During the early 1920s a number of New York addicts supported themselves by collecting scrap metal from industrial dumps, so earning the label ‘junkies’. Also at this time was the discovery by addicts of the enhanced euphoric effects when heroin was injected with the hypodermic syringe.

Heroin addiction was blamed for a number of the 260 murders that occurred in 1922 in New York. These concerns led the US Congress to ban all domestic manufacture of heroin in 1924 which left only morphine and codeine available only still by prescription.

Sounds familiar right?

Source:

http://www.intheknowzone.com/substance-abuse-topics/heroin/history.html