Saturday, October 18, 2008

BEFORE THERE WAS A NICKY BARNES THERE WAS A HEINRICH DRESER:THE OWNER OF THE BRAND
















Heroin was first synthesized in 1874 by C. R. Alder Wright, an English chemist working at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, England. He had been experimenting with combining morphine with various acids. He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride over a stove for several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine, now called diacetylmorphine. The compound was sent to F. M. Pierce of Owens College in Manchester for analysis, who reported the following to Wright:
Doses ... were subcutaneously injected into young dogs and rabbits ... with the following general results ... great prostration, fear, and sleepiness speedily following the administration, the eyes being sensitive, and pupils constrict, considerable salivation being produced in dogs, and slight tendency to vomiting in some cases, but no actual emesis. Respiration was at first quickened, but subsequently reduced, and the heart's action was diminished, and rendered irregular. Marked want of coordinating power over the muscular movements, and loss of power in the pelvis and hind limbs, together with a diminution of temperature in the rectum of about 4° (rectal failure).[7]
Wright's invention, however, did not lead to any further developments, and heroin only became popular after it was independently re-synthesized 23 years later by another chemist, Felix Hoffmann. Hoffmann, working at the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld, Germany, was instructed by his supervisor Heinrich Dreser to acetylate morphine with the objective of producing codeine, a constituent of the opium poppy, similar to morphine pharmacologically but less potent and less addictive. But instead of producing codeine, the experiment produced an acetylated form of morphine that was actually 1.5-2 times more potent than morphine itself. Bayer would name the substance "heroin", probably from the word heroisch, German for heroic, because in field studies people using the medicine felt "heroic".[8]
From 1898 through to 1910 heroin was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough suppressant. Bayer gave out free samples of Heroin to doctors. The doctors prescribed it to their patients. Heroin quickly gained widespread acceptance in the medical community unaware of its addictive qualities. Bayer was soon enthusiastically selling it in dozens of countries.
Something odd happened. The doctors began noticing an inordinate demand by their patients, who did not really seem to be in respiratory distress, for Heroin cough syrup. Bayer stopped producing and selling Heroin in 1913 and deleted mention of it in their official company history. Heroin was outlawed in 1924.
Inadvertently, Bayer may have caused more headaches than they have cured

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