Homeless in Arizona

In this article on wikipedia.org the only adverse effects they list for heroin is that it makes you poop and of course that it is addictive.

Like most opioids, unadulterated heroin does not cause many long-term complications other than dependence and constipation.

There are other adverse effects to using the drug, but they are not caused by the drug itself, but by the fact that the drug is illegal.

Heroin or diacetylmorphine was first synthesized in 1874 by C. R. Alder Wright. It was re-invented 23 years later by Felix Hoffmann. Hoffmann, working at the Aktiengesellschaft Farbenfabriken which today is the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld, Germany.

According to this article heroin was given to babies to shut them up.

Opium for Asthma and Fussy Babies

In 1830, opium use in Britain reached its peak, with 22,000 pounds imported from Turkey every year. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Keats wrote poems while on the stuff. When 24,000 pounds made it to America, customs officials took notice — and imposed a duty on it. While people were declaiming the smoking of opium as recreation, everyone "knew" that medicinal use was a-okay.

Which is why they poured opium down babies' throats. Literally. Stickney and Poor's Pure Paregoric syrup had forty-six percent alcohol, one and three-sixteenth "grains of opium per ounce," and contained a dosage chart that included five-day-old infants. They were to be given five drops of the stuff, which quieted them down. Two-week-olds got eight drops. Five-year-olds got twenty-five drops. An adult got a teaspoon. The only chance a baby had of not being drugged was an adult that liked the teaspoon too much to give any to their child. Another company made opium-filled cough drops, cherry flavored, and advertised it with cherubic children gathering up cherries (the natural ingredient) to put in the bottle.

Opium was also used as a treatment for asthma. Asthma was considered a "seizure" disorder, located mainly in the muscles. Opium was thought to relax the muscles constricting the tubes in the lungs, and allow the sufferer to breathe more easily. All kinds of opium tinctures and vapors were devised to help poor asthmatics.

Cocaine for Public Speaking and Pope-Approved Wine

But even if opium was given to children, it at least wasn't endorsed by the Pope. Cocaine, it seemed, was the preferred drug of religious leaders everywhere, and it started with Angelo Mariani in 1863. The vintner decided to do something to spice up his wine, looked around for something to really add a kick, and settled on coca leaves. The coca leaves transferred benzoylecgonine and ecgonine methyl ester to the alcohol in the wine, and the three combine to form a powerful psychoactive drug.

Vin Mariani was so popular that it earned a place on the person of two different Popes. Pope Leo VIII and Pope Saint Pius X both carried hip flasks of the wine, and Pope Leo awarded Mariani a Vatican gold medal, something the advertisements for Vin Mariani regularly stressed. The wine became the inspiration for using coca leaves in coca cola. Many energizing beverages with coca leaves were sold. One tonic advised customers to drink a glass after each meal. Children were to drink half a glass.

The Pope's use of coca wine became the inspiration for other religious leaders. Cocaine drops were sold regularly for those who had to do public speaking. Supposedly it was meant to give speakers a smooth and rich speaking voice, but its special ability as an "invigorator" featured prominently in most advertisements. Preachers, with their need to give animated and prolonged sermons, and especially stump preachers that traveled around, were frequent users of these lozenges. Stage actors, singers, and teachers took them as well.

In this article they seem to demonize Bayer for advocating the use of heroin on babies. But I suspect this is more of drug war nut jobs just demonizing heroin for what was standard medical practices in the late 1800's and early 1900's.

It's not news that Bayer, the venerable German drug company, made its first fortunes in the late 1890s when it commercialized both aspirin and heroin as cough, cold and pain remedies. Many people have seen the sepia images of vintage Bayer's "Heroin" brand medicine bottles. But it's less widely known that Bayer promoted heroin for use in children suffering from coughs, colds and "irritation" as late as 1912, according to an anti-Bayer watchdog group.

The children's campaign ran in Spanish newspapers, according to the Coalition Against Bayer Dangers, a longtime company gadfly, which unearthed the forgotten images two days ago. One ad, urging the use of "Heroina" to treat bronchitis in kids, shows two unattended children reaching for a bottle of the opiate across a kitchen table. Another shows a mom spoon feeding it to her sickly little girl. "La tos desaparece," the ad says -- "the cough disappears":

Heroin was restricted to prescription-only use in the U.S. in 1914 and eventually banned by the nascent FDA altogether in 1924, except under very strict medical conditions.

An in this article we find out that heroin was invented about the same time as aspirin by the Bayer Company, but heroin was considered the "wonder drug". Yes, aspirin is a wonder drug, but it has adverse side effects for many people while heroin doesn't.

Aspirin isn’t the only “wonder drug that works wonders” that Bayer made. The German pharmaceutical giant also introduced heroin to the world.

The company was looking for a cough suppressant that didn’t have problematic side effects, mainly addiction, like morphine and codeine. And if it could relieve pain better than morphine, that was a welcome bonus. [Yes, initially heroin was not thought to be additive like morphine. Some other articles say this was because in the beginning heroin was taken orally and when used that way it take much longer for it's addictive side effect to be discovered]

When one of Bayer’s chemists approached the head of the pharmacological lab with ASA — to be sold under the name “aspirin” — he was waved away. The boss was more interested in something else the chemists had cooked up — diacetylmorphine. (This narcotic had been created in 1874 by a British chemist, who had never done anything with it.)

Using the tradename “Heroin” — because early testers said it made them feel heroisch (heroic) — Bayer sold this popular drug by the truckload starting in 1898. Free samples were sent to thousands of doctors; studies appeared in medical journals. The Sunday Times of London noted: “By 1899, Bayer was producing about a ton of heroin a year, and exporting the drug to 23 countries,” including the US. Medicines containing smack were available over-the-counter at drug stores, just as aspirin is today. The American Medical Association gave heroin its stamp of approval in 1907.

And here is another article on this history of Bayer Heroin.

Did you know that Heroin was originally a brand name for cough syrup?

In 1874, German scientists developed a formula for a painkiller that they thought would be less addictive than morphine. They simply added two acetyls to morphine to synthesize diacetylmorphine.

Heinrich Dreser, the head of Bayer drug development tried it on animals and humans. He, also, tried it on himself, which may have been the problem. He was very pleased with the results and decided it was a good treatment for many ailments especially respiratory ones like bronchitis, asthma and tuberculosis. The Bayer company started marketing Heroin in 1898. They derived the name from the German word heroisch. Often, they would place it in ads along with their Bayer aspirin advertising the merits of their new cough syrup, "Heroin- the sedative for coughs."

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.

The scientists thought that Heroin was not as addictive as morphine, but it turned out to be two to three times more addictive. It was already metabolized and would go straight into the blood stream and immediately cross the blood-brain barrier causing immediate euphoria.

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.

In this article we find out why heroin was a miracle drug in the time period in which it was discovered.

In 1863, a dynamic German merchant called Friedrich Bayer (1825-76) set up a factory in Elberfeld to exploit new chemical procedures for making colourful dyes from coal-tar. German coal-tar dye manufacture expanded rapidly, surpassing English or French production six-fold by the mid-1970s. In the mid-1880s, however, price conventions and raw material availability deteriorated in the German dye industry, so the Bayer company invested in scientific research to diversify its product range. In 1888, a new substance synthesised by Bayer chemists became the company’s first commercial medicine.

Synthetic chemical medicines were something new. In the early years of the nineteenth century, medicines had been prepared using crude natural materials like opium, the dried milky juice of poppy seed pods. A young German pharmacist called Friedrich Sertürner (1783-1841) had first applied chemical analysis to plant drugs, by purifying in 1805 the main active ingredient of opium. Recalling Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, Sertürner gave his drug the name ‘morphium’ which later became morphine. Perhaps appropriately, the discoverer of morphine was in due course nominated for academic honours by the author of ‘Faust’, Goethe himself.

The possibility of obtaining morphine and other pure drugs from plants brought commercial reward for entrepreneurs such as Georg Merck (1825-73), who turned his family’s seventeenth-century pharmacy in Darmstadt into a major supplier of these new products. Morphine was widely used for pain relief in the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, in combination with the hypodermic syringe, which was invented in 1853. In contrast to the old crude preparations, precisely measured doses of the new purified drugs could be administered. Furthermore, drug action in the body could be more scientifically investigated. Pharmacology therefore developed rapidly not least in Germany.

As part of the Prussianisation of Alsace-Lorraine following the Franco-Prussian War, a well-equipped institute was built in Strasbourg in 1872 for the eminent German pharmacologist Oswald Schmeideberg (1838-1921). One of Schmeideberg’s many talented pupils, Heinrich Dreser (1860-1924), ended up as head of the pharmacological laboratory at the product-hungry Bayer Company in Elberfeld.

Now that plant-derived drugs were available in purified form, chemists could modify them to form new molecules that might prove more effective, or perhaps safer to use. In the later 1890s, Dreser and his colleagues adopted this strategy to produce for Bayer two of the most famous drugs in the world today. Heroin, made by adding two acetyl groups to the morphine molecule, was followed a year later by another acetyl derivative of a painkiller from drugs; the second natural drug was salicylic acid and the Bayer derivative was names ‘Aspirin’.

Ironically from today’s perspective, heroin took its name from the adjective heroisch (heroic) sometimes used by nineteenth-century German doctors for a powerful medicine. Dreser presented his new drug as a cough, chest and lung medicine to the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in 1898. Painful respiratory diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis (‘consumption’) were then the leading causes of death, and in the days before antibiotics or the BCG vaccine, doctors could only prescribe narcotics to alleviate the sufferings of patients who otherwise could not sleep. There was, therefore, considerable interest in the highly effective new drug. Today, heroin is know to be a more potent and faster acting painkiller than morphine because it passes more readily from the bloodstream into the brain. Heroin was praised in a number of early clinical trials, and was rapidly adopted in medical establishments in many countries. Bayer advertised the drug in German, English, Italian, Russian and other languages.

Heroin was prescribed in place of morphine or codeine (another constituent of opium, isolated in 1832). In a typical early report of 1898, G. Strube of the Medical University Clinic of Berlin tested oral doses of 5 and 10 mg of heroin on fifty phthisis patients and found it effective in relieving their coughs and producing sleep. He noted no unpleasant reactions; indeed the patients liked it and continued to take the heroin after he ceased to prescribe. The addictive potential of heroin’s parent, morphine, was only too well known, and evidence steadily emerged that the new drug was not the hoped-for improvement in this respect. Horatio C. Wood Jr. reported in 1899 thst heroin dosages had to be increased with usage to remain effective. Such was the preoccupation with morphine addiction, however, that some doctors, such as A. Morel-Lavallèe in 1902, even advocated treatment by heroin in ‘demorphinisation’. This practice was criticised by J. Jarrige in 1902, who by then had observed that heroin withdrawal symptoms were even worse than those of morphine.

By 1903, the writing was on the wall: in an article in the Alabama Medical Journal entitled ‘The Heroin Habit Another Curse’, G.E. Pettey declared that of the last 150 people he had treated for drug addiction, eight were dependent on heroin. Nevertheless, other physicians remained reluctant to abandon this highly effective drug. In 1911, J.D. Trawick could still lament in the Kentucky Medical Journal: ‘I feel that bringing charges against heroin is almost like questioning the fidelity of a good friend. I have used it with good results.’

The United States was the country in which heroin addiction first became a serious problem. By the late nineteenth century, countries such as Britain and Germany had enacted pharmacy laws to control dangerous drugs, but under the US Constitution, individual states were responsible for medical regulation. Late in the century some state laws required morphine or cocaine to be prescribed by physician, but drugs could still be obtained from bordering states with laxer regulation. Moreover, this era was the peak of a craze for over-the-counter ‘patent’ medicines that were still permitted to contain these drugs. At the turn of the century it is believed that over a quarter of a million Americans (from a population of 76 million) were addicted to opium, morphine or cocaine.

After years of resistance, American patent medicine manufacturers were required by the federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 accurately to label contents of their products. These included ‘soothing syrups’ for bawling babies, and ‘cures’ for chronic ills such as consumption or even drug addiction, which previously had not declared (and sometimes denied) their content of opium, cocaine or cannabis. Consumers by this time were becoming fearful of addictive drugs, so the newly labelled medicines either declined in popularity or removed their drug ingredients. (The pre-eminent survival from this is era is a tonic beverage from Atlanta called ‘Coca-Cola’.) Bayer’s 1899 launch of Aspirin, moreover had made available a safe and effective painkiller to replace opium for everyday use.

In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed the Harrison Narcotic Act, which exploited the federal government’s power to tax as a mechanism for finally enabling federal regulation of medical transactions in opium derivatives or cocaine. The main impetus for national drug laws in the US was diplomatic. [In those years the Feds knew the Constitution didn't give them the power to make drugs illegal, so they made them illegal by taxing them. And of course around 1970 the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Tax was ruled unconstitutional as a result of Timothy Leary's arrest] As today, China was seen as the greatest emerging market, to which the Americans sought improved access. To help the massive Chinese opium problems, the US had led an international campaign culminating in the Hague Opium Convention of 1912, which required signatories to enact domestic legislation controlling opium trade. After the First World War, the Hague Convention was added to the Treaty of Versailles, requiring the British Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, despite the absence of a serious drug problem in this country.

The now familiar association of youthful heroin abusers with underworld supplies was first noted in New York, where illicit availability was probably greatest due to the proximity of many of the chemical companies that then distributed heroin. In 1910, New York’s Bellevue Hospital made its first ever admission for heroin addiction. In 1915, it admitted 425 heroin addicts, who were, according to the Psychiatric Bulletin of the New York State Hospitals, ‘in many instances members of gangs who congregate on street corners particularly at night, and make insulting remarks to people who pass.’ It was noted that ‘in practically every case the drug had been tried by one of the members of the gang who then induced the other members to try it’. These early heroin users were mostly between seventeen and twenty-five years old, and took the drug by sniffing.

New York addiction specialist A. Lambert in 1924 described heroin as a ‘vice of the underworld’ acquired by the young through ‘vicious associations’. American drug abusers were completely dependent on black market sources soon after 1919, when legal interpretation of the Harrison Act outlawed medical prescription of narcotics to maintain addicts. At this stage, heroin increased in popularity among drug dealers, who appreciated its black market qualities as a compact and powerful substance that could easily be adulterated. Another development at this time was the discovery by addicts of the enhanced euphoric effects when heroin was injected with the hypodermic syringe.

During the early 1920s a number of New York addicts supported themselves by collecting scrap metal from industrial dumps, so earning the label ‘junkies’. Less savoury behaviour by heroin addicts was, however, causing concern to the authorities and public. Dr Lambert claimed that ‘heroin destroys the sense of responsibility to the herd’. Heroin addiction was blamed for a number of the 260 murders that occurred in 1922 in New York (which compared with seventeen in London). These concerns led the US Congress to ban all domestic manufacture of heroin in 1924.

Two years later, however, US Narcotic Inspector S.L. Rakusin declared that heroin seemed ‘more plentiful than it ever was before’. Organised criminals were still obtaining heroin produced by legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturers in Western Europe, and later Turkey and Bulgaria, until restrictive policies of the League of Nations drove heroin manufacture largely underground by the early 1930s. An exception was militarist Japan and its occupied territories, where pharmaceutical firms produced heroin on a massive scale for the Chinese market until the end of the Second World War. Since then heroin has effectively belonged to the realm of international crime.

And in this article we have more on the early history of heroin which at the time was a miricle drug because of it's ability to suppress coughs which at the time was a major killer.

Today I found out the pharmaceutical company Bayer coined the name “Heroin” and marketed the drug as a non-addictive cough medicine, among other uses.

While opium itself has been commonly used since at least 3400 BC, heroin is a relatively new invention, derived from opium. Heroin, more technically known as diacetylmorphine, was first synthesized in 1874 by chemist Charles Romley Alder Wright, working at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London, England. He discovered the drug after playing around with mixing morphine with various acids. Specifically, he created it after boiling acetic anhydride with anhydrous morphine alkaloid for a few hours, which resulted in what we now commonly call heroin. After running a few experiments with it on animals, though, he abandoned his work on the drug.

Twenty three years later, a man named Felix Hoffman, working at Bayer, in Germany, managed to independently synthesize Heroin when he was trying to produce codeine. This new derivative of opium was found to be significantly more potent than morphine and so Heinrich Dreser, head of the pharmacological laboratory at Bayer, decided they should move forward with it, rather than another drug they had recently created (Aspirin).

It should be noted that Dreser was apparently well aware of Wright having synthesized Heroin 23 years before, but despite this, he claimed heroin was an original Bayer product and by early 1898, they began the animal testing phase of the product, testing it primarily on rabbits and frogs. They next moved on to testing it on people, primarily workers at Bayer, including Heinrich Dreser himself.

After successful trials, Heroin was presented to the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians as more or less a miracle drug that was “10 times” more effective than codeine as a cough medicine and worked even better than morphine as a pain killer. He also stated that it had almost no toxic effects including being completely non-addictive. Dreser particularly pushed Heroin as the drug of choice for treating asthma, bronchitis, tuberculosis, and phthisis.

If it seems odd to you that he should push Heroin as a cough medicine, over its pain killing effects, it should be noted that at the time tuberculosis and pneumonia were among the world’s leading causes of death and one of the leading methods to treat this was using codeine, which is fairly addictive given regular use. Because Heroin worked well as a sedative and respiration depressor, it did indeed work extremely well as a type of cough medicine and allowed people affected by debilitating coughs to finally be able to get some proper rest, free from coughing fits. Further, because it was marketed as non-addictive, unlike morphine or codeine, it was initially seen as a major medical breakthrough.

Just one year after its release, Heroin became a world-wide hit, despite it not actually being marketed directly to the public, but rather simply to physicians. Heroin was soon sold in a variety of forms: mixed in cough syrup; made into tablets; mixed in a glycerin solution as an elixir; and put into water-soluble heroin salts, among others. At the end of this first year, it was popularly sold in over 23 countries with Bayer producing around one ton of it in that year.

And here is another article about how many drugs which are illegal today were sold over the counter to treat illnesses.

9 reasons why there wasn’t stress in the good old days

Bayer Yeah baby, between 1890 and 1910, heroin was sold as a ‘less addictive form of morphine’. At some point, it was even recommended to treat the usual cough, but only in children. Diacetylmorphine was first synthesized by Alder Wright, who concluded it was even more addictive than opium, and abandoned research in this direction. However, the Bayer company concluded that it was very effective in treating moderate pains and dealing with diseases such as asthma or tuberculosis, so they branded it as Heroin. What’s interesting is that it was branded pretty much at the same time with acetylsalicylic acid, that became later known as aspirin. It’s hard to say which one of these had more success…

Boehringer & Soehne were located in Mannheim, Germany. Never heard of them?? Well, if they were doing today what they did about a century ago now, you’d definitely know about them, because they proudly advertised their products, claiming the make the best produts from cocaine and chinine. It wasn’t only the quality that made them so good, as their ads said: “Prices no higher than for any other brand”. You just don’t see that anymore, sadly. Opium for newborns, and not only

Stickney and Poor’s are known today mostly for spices, but back in the day, they also sold this syrup that helped babies sleep well; and if the opium inside wasn’t enough, then the 46% alcohol would definitely do the trick.

Believe it or not, wines with cocaine were by all standards not uncommon. Metcalf Coca Wine was one of the famous brands and everybody who drank it said it will make you happy, and was also good as a medicinal treatment. Maltine Coca Wine was also used a lot in the U.S., especially in New York, where it was made. It was recommended for health reasons – a glass after each meal, and for the children, just a half glass of course.

But without a doubt the most appreciated such wine was the Mariani Wine. It was so good, that pope Leo XIII never left the house without a bottle of it. He even awarded the producer with Vatican’s Gold Medal.

Benzedrine (racemic amphetamine) inhalers were available in the U.S. until the mid 50s, and they were so appreciated that even airlines gave them to passengers to treat discomfort when the plane was taking off and landing. It was also proclaimed that more than 10 million Benzedrine inhalers had been distributed in the first 7 years it was released, which means they sold even better than mister McDonald’s hamburgers.

It’s not sure how good this treatment was, but at least, the National Vaporizer Vapor-OL (opium) Treatment no. 6 for asthma (as it was called) provided a unique way of smoking opium. You had a pretty volatile liquid that went in a sort of frying pan, heated by a small kerosen lamp placed under the pan.

So yeah, everything seems to be good, at least if you go by the name, but these ‘dragees’ were basically Cocaine throat lozenges. Yeah, cocaine was not only fun, as with the wine but also useful. This Belgian product was “indispensable for singers, teachers, and orators”. Word. Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup

Of course, as a working mother, things are never easy. So when you get home, you want to get some peace and quiet, and that’s exactly what this soothing syrup was doing. Because no matter how noisy and restless a child is, 65 miligrams of morphine per fluid ounce does the trick.

Cocaine toothache drops

Without a doubt, cocaine is our winner (perhaps there’s a lesson here, somewhere, I’m not sure). These cocaine toothache drops were absolute miracle drugs, and they cured aches almost instantly and they also came with a bonus: after taking them, children were always happier.

Here is an interesting article on the intertwined history of aspirin and heroin.

THE MAN in the 100-year-old photograph is not, to the modern eye, prepossessing. Balding, bespectacled and clerkish, he scarcely dominates his own portrait, let alone the picture of him with his staff in his laboratory.

Yet Heinrich Dreser, chemist and opportunist, was one of the most influential men of his age.

Between 1897 and 1914, Dreser worked for Bayer, the former dye factory that was to become the first of the world's pharmaceutical giants, in Wuppertal, north-west Germany.

Friedrich Engels was born there. While Dreser made less of a mark on history, you could argue he had the greater influence on the 20th century. As head of Bayer's pharmacological laboratory, he was responsible for the launch of two drugs that have shaped the way we live: aspirin, the world's most successful legal drug; and heroin, the most successful illegal one.

Aspirin, of which the world now consumes 40 billion tablets a year, was launched 100 years ago next February. A fanfare of publicity will mark the centenary.

The centenary of heroin is more ambiguous: it was launched in November 1898 but was registered as a trademark in various countries from June that year, most lucratively in the US in August. But whenever the centenary falls, Bayer won't be celebrating.

This is understandable; but the stories of aspirin and heroin are intertwined, not least through Dreser.

Born in 1860, in Darmstadt, the son of a physics professor, he showed promise as a chemist from an early age. After receiving his doctorate from Heidelberg University, he worked in various laboratories before becoming a professor at Bonn University in 1893. Four years later he joined the Bayer Company, where he was in charge of testing the efficacy and safety of new drugs.

Dreser was admired for his thorough, methodical approach, and for his innovations in testing (he was, for example, the first chemist to use animal experiments on an industrial scale). The credit for originating new products for Bayer belonged, strictly speaking, to the researcher Arthur Eichengruen, but Dreser had the power to decide which new products would be developed. He had also negotiated a special deal which guaranteed him a share of the profits from products he launched.

In 1897 the Bayer chemist Felix Hoffmann, acting on Eichengruen's instructions, discovered a new process for modifying salicyclic acid (a remedy for fever and inflammation which unfortunately has excruciating digestive side effects) to produce acetylsalicyclic acid (ASA).

This compound, later to be named Aspirin, had been isolated before and the healing powers of salicylates (derived from willow bark) had been known for centuries. But Hoffmann had created a reliable process for making it.

Eichengruen enthusiastically recommended ASA to Dreser in 1898. Dreser, after cursory consideration, rejected it. Ostensibly, his objection was that ASA would have an "enfeebling" action on the heart. "The product has no value," he pronounced confidently. But the real problem was almost certainly that he had another product on his mind whose impending success he was anxious not to jeopardise. This was heroin.

Like aspirin, the drug that Bayer launched under the trademark Heroin in 1898 was not an original discovery. Diacetylmorphine, a white, odourless, bitter, crystalline powder deriving from morphine, had been invented in 1874 by an English chemist, C R Wright.

But Dreser was the first to see its commercial potential. Scientists had been looking for some time for a non-addictive substitute for morphine, then widely used as a painkiller and in the treatment of respiratory diseases. If diacetylmorphine could be shown to be such a product, Bayer - and Dreser - would hit the jackpot.

Diacetylmorphine was first synthesised in the Bayer laboratory in 1897 - by Hoffmann, two weeks after he first synthesised ASA. The work seems to have been initiated by Dreser, who was by then aware of Wright's discovery, even though he subsequently implied that heroin was an original Bayer invention.

By early 1898 was testing it on sticklebacks, frogs and rabbits. He also tested it on some of Bayer's workers, and on himself. The workers loved it, some saying it made them feel "heroic" (heroisch). This was also the term used by chemists to describe any strong drug (and diacetylmorphine is four times stronger than morphine). Creating a brand name was easy.

In November 1898, Dreser presented the drug to the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians, claiming it was 10 times more effective as a cough medicine than codeine, but had only a tenth of its toxic effects. It was also more effective than morphine as a painkiller. It was safe. It wasn't habit-forming. In short, it was a wonder drug - the Viagra of its day.

"What we don't recognise now," says David Muso, professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine at Yale Medical School, "is that this met what was then a desperate need - not for a painkiller, but for a cough remedy".

Tuberculosis and pneumonia were then the leading causes of death, and even routine coughs and colds could be severely incapacitating. Heroin, which both depresses respiration and, as a sedative, gives a restorative night's sleep, seemed a godsend.

The initial response to its launch was overwhelmingly positive. Dreser had already written about the drug in medical journals, and studies had endorsed his view that heroin could be effective in treating asthma, bronchitis, phthisis and tuberculosis. Now mailshots and free samples were sent out by the thousand to physicians in Europe and the US. The label on the samples showed a lion and a globe. (There is a notorious brand of Burmese heroin, Double Globe, that uses remarkably similar packaging today.)

By 1899, Bayer was producing about a ton of heroin a year, and exporting the drug to 23 countries. The country where it really took off was the US, where there was already a large population of morphine addicts, a craze for patent medicines, and a relatively lax regulatory framework. Manufacturers of cough syrup were soon lacing their products with Bayer heroin.

There were heroin pastilles, heroin cough lozenges, heroin tablets, water-soluble heroin salts and a heroin elixir in a glycerine solution. Bayer never advertised heroin to the public but the publicity material it sent to physicians was unambiguous. One flyer described the product thus: "Heroin: the Sedative for Coughs . . . order a supply from your jobber."

"It possesses many advantages over morphine," wrote the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1900. "It's not hypnotic, and there's no danger of acquiring a habit."

But worrying rumours were surfacing. As early as 1899, researchers began to report patients developing "tolerance" to the drug, while a German researcher denounced it as "an extremely dangerous poison". By 1902 - when heroin sales were accounting for roughly five percent of Bayer's net profits - French and American researchers were reporting cases of "heroinism" and addiction.

The bandwagon took time to stop. Between 1899 and 1905, at least 180 clinical works on heroin were published around the world, and most were favourable, if cautious. In 1906, the American Medical Association approved heroin for medical use, though with strong reservations about a "habit" that was "readily formed".

But with the accumulation of negative reports and the steady encroachment on the market by other manufacturers, it was clear heroin would never deliver the riches that Dreser had yearned for.

Had heroin been his only pet project, this disappointment could have spelt career disaster. Dreser had the kind of personality that needed commercial results to lend it plausibility. With his unfashionably formal clothes and his habit of dragging an overweight dachshund to work with him, he was seen as an eccentric loner, a "difficult" man whose ready sarcasm and autocratic manner meant he did not want for enemies.

Luckily, although his first "baby" was showing signs of turning into a monster, Dreser had belatedly adopted another: aspirin. Eichengruen, refusing to accept Dreser's rejection of ASA, had continued to investigate it and to lobby for its development. Eventually, Dreser recognised which way the wind was blowing, tested ASA on himself (as well as on his laboratory of rabbits), and finally published an enthusiastic scientific paper recommending it, particularly for the treatment of rheumatism - but omitting to mention the contributions of Eichengruen and Hoffmann. In February 1899, the brand name "Aspirin" was registered, and in June, Dreser presided over its launch.

Like heroin, aspirin more or less sold itself. As a painkiller without undesirable side effects, it was - and remained for decades - unique. By the end of 1899 it was being used all over Europe and the US, and by the time the heroin bubble burst, aspirin had more than filled the gap. Bayer was on its way to becoming an industrial giant. Hoffman and Eichengruen do not seem to have received any special compensation for their efforts. For Dreser, though, the rewards were spectacular.

In 1913, Bayer decided to stop making heroin. There had been an explosion of heroinrelated admissions at New York and Philadelphia hospitals, and in East Coast cities a substantial population of recreational users was reported (some supported their habits by collecting and selling scrap metal, hence the name "junkie"). Prohibition seemed inevitable and, sure enough, the next year the use of heroin without prescription was outlawed in the US. (A court ruling in 1919 also determined it illegal for doctors to prescribe it to addicts.)

But Dreser was now earning, on top of his "substantial" salary, more than 100 000 marks a year (about By 1914 Dreser was an exceptionally rich 53-year-old - so much so that he decided not to renew his contract at Bayer. When war broke out he moved to Dusseldorf as honorary, unsalaried professor of his own pharmacological institute at the new Medical Academy.

Thereafter, the record becomes indistinct. His first wife died, there were no children and, it appears, few friends. There were rumours that he was addicted to heroin himself. Eventually, his health deteriorated. His last years may or may not have been happy. But they were certainly comfortable - which is more than can be said for Eichengruen, who, in his eighties, emerged from a concentration camp to write an unpublished denunciation of Dreser's "discovery" of aspirin.

In 1924, health problems forced Dreser to give up his institute and he moved to Zurich, where he remarried. That year, the US banned the use and manufacture of heroin altogether, even for medical purposes. (In Britain, the medical use of heroin continues to this day, accounting for 95 percent of the world's legal heroin consumption.) The same year, four days before Christmas, Dreser died.

The cause of death was given as a cerebral apoplexy, or stroke. It is just conceivable - had anyone known it - that he could have averted this fate by the simple expedience of taking an aspirin a day. If the rumours of addiction were true, the irony is doubled: Dreser, incorrigible in his misjudgment, had spent his twilight years taking a daily dose of the wrong wonder drug.

Even before its properties as a prophylactic against circulatory disease became known, aspirin changed the lives of millions, reducing the sum of human misery. It also produced untold wealth for, among others, the shareholders of Bayer, which still earns about R4-billion a year from the drug. (Those "others" include the generations of lawyers who acted in an 80-year orgy of litigation in which the original Bayer company, having had its American assets confiscated at the end of World War One, fought to reclaim the right to sell "Bayer aspirin" in the US.)

The impact of heroin is harder to assess. In 1898, there were an estimated 250 000 morphine addicts in the US - a per capita rate roughly twice as high as today's. In Britain, similarly, opium use was widespread, especially in East Anglia, where it was a more or less necessary antidote to the malaria endemic in the Fens. It was also used as a sedative for babies. (In Britain, however, opium seems to have been superseded not by heroin but by other modern drugs - notably aspirin.)

But the appearance of heroin played a crucial role in cementing the link between drug abuse and crime. Pharmacologically, heroin has the same effect as morphine. But you need only about a quarter as much to get the same effect. It is also cheaper, quicker and easier to use. As national and international legislation against opiates gathered force after 1914, addicts who wished to continue their habit inevitably switched to heroin. By 1924, 98 percent of New York's drug addicts were thought to be heroin addicts. With legal channels of supply closed, criminal gangs - first Jewish, then Italian - began to monopolise the trade. By the end of the 30s, the Mafia was inextricably involved.

Today, heroin use in Britain and the US is increasing faster than at any time since the 60s: heroin seizures rose by 135 percent between 1996 and 1997. There are thought to be between 160 000 and 200 000 heroin addicts in the UK, who spend almost R30-billion a year on heroin. And the British government spends R14-billion a year on drug-related policies.

The other great change resulting from Dreser's marketing of a faster-acting and more conveniently consumed opiate has been a change in the profile of the average opiate abuser. In 1898, the typical morphine addict in Britain or the US was a middle-class woman in her forties, whereas today's typical addict is an 18-year-old male.

Another interesting article on this history of heroin and aspirin.

In 1899 the company Bayer was producing roughly a ton of ‘Bayer’s Heroin’ a year and exporting it to 23 different countries. Bayer Heroin took off in the USA, as there was already a large population of morphine addicts, a craze for patent medicines, and a relatively lax regulatory framework. This resulted in many manufacturers of cough syrup lacing their products with Bayer heroin.

There were heroin pastilles, heroin cough lozenges, heroin tablets, water-soluble heroin salts and a heroin elixir in a glycerin solution. Bayer never advertised heroin to the public but the publicity material it sent to physicians was unambiguous. One flyer described the product: “Heroin: the Sedative for Coughs … order a supply from your jobber.”

“It possesses many advantages over morphine,” wrote the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1900. “It’s not hypnotic, and there’s no danger of acquiring a habit.”

But as early as 1899, researchers began to report patients developing “tolerance” to the drug, while a German researcher denounced it as “an extremely dangerous poison”. By 1902 - when heroin sales were accounting for roughly five percent of Bayer’s net profits - French and American researchers were reporting cases of “heroinism” and addiction.

Between 1899 and 1905, at least 180 clinical works on heroin were published around the world, and most were favourable, if cautious. In 1906, the American Medical Association approved heroin for medical use, though with strong reservations about a “habit” that was “readily formed”. In 1913, Bayer decided to stop selling heroin. There had been an explosion of heroin related admissions at New York and Philadelphia hospitals, and in East Coast cities a substantial population of recreational users was reported. Some supported their habits by collecting and selling scrap metal and this is where the name “junkie” comes from.

Prohibition seemed inevitable and the next year the use of heroin without prescription was outlawed in the US. By 1898, there were an estimated 250,000 morphine addicts in the US – (a per capita rate roughly twice as high as today’s) this resulted in a court ruling in 1919, which determined it illegal for doctors to prescribe it to addicts.

In Britain, similarly, opium use was widespread, especially in East Anglia, where it was a more or less necessary antidote to the malaria endemic in the Fens. It was also used as a sedative for babies.

In this article article they talk about how many drugs that are illegal today were commonly used for both medical and recreational use before they were made illegal.

Many of the substances prohibited today were legally available in the past. This small exposition contains samples of the many psychoactive medicines widely available during the late-19th century through the mid-20th century.

Background

The prohibition of psychoactive substances has evolved gradually in the United States and in Europe. The opium-containing preparation laudanum had been widely available since the 18th century. Morphine, cocaine, and even heroin were seen as miracle cures when they were first discovered. During the mid to late 19th century, many manufacturers proudly proclaimed that their products contained cocaine or opium. A few, like Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup for infants which contained morphine, were more guarded in divulging their principal ingredients. By the beginning of the 20th century, problems with habitual use of cocaine and opiates was becoming increasingly apparent. This led to the removal of these substances from some products (e.g., Coca Cola) and to the introduction of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) in the United States which required the listing of ingredients on product labels. Nonetheless, standard narcotic remedies like paregoric remained readily available into the early 20th century, and Benzedrine inhalers were marketed without prescription until the early 1950s. Codeine wasn't removed from most over-the-counter cough suppressants until the early 1980s.

Cocaine-Containing Products

There were three types of medicines often containing cocaine--topical anesthetics such as toothache powders, catarrh medicines for relieving head and chest congestion, and medicinal (probably also recreational) cocaine-containing wines advocated for their numerous beneficial effects.

Cocaine-containing topical anesthetics

Cocaine is an effective local anesthetic, and some of the earliest uses of cocaine was for its local anesthetic properties. Today, other compounds such as lidocaine and procaine are the medically preferred local anesthetics. These compounds do not produce the mood-elevating and euphorigenic "side effects" that can occur with cocaine.

Cocaine toothache drops

Cocaine toothache drops were popular with children and with their parents. Not only would the medicine numb the pain, but it could also put the user in a "better" mood.

Cocaine throat lozenges

Cocaine-containing throat lozenges, "indispensable for singers, teachers, and orators." In addition to quieting a sore throat, these lozenges undoubtedly provided the "pick-me-up" to keep these professionals performing at their peak. This box of lozenges is from a Belgium pharmacy (c. 1900). Local pharmacies often bought their drugs in bulk and packaged them for consumers under their own labels.

Cocaine-containing wines

There were many companies competing in the lucrative coca-wine market. Vin Mariani is the most recognized and perhaps the most popular at the time, but many other brands were produced in the United States and abroad.

Metcalf's Coca Wine was one of a large number of cocaine-containing wines available on the market. All claimed medicinal effects, although they were undoubtedly consumed for their "recreational" value as well.

Vin Mariani was the leading coca wine. This advertisement features an endorsement from Berthelier, a popular late 19th century actor. The caption immediately below the photograph reads, "Your marvelous Tonic needs certainly no further recommendation as everyone is familiar with it, and no one would be without it. I claim 'VIN MARIANI' can have no equal; it will live forever." The caption also proclaims "over 7,000 written endorsements from prominent physicians in Europe and America" and that the product has had acclaim for 30 years. (From Harper's Magazine, March, 1894.) In addition to endorsements from celebrities, physicians, and scientists, Pope Leo XIII also endorsed the popular product for its beneficial effects.

This coca wine was made by the Maltine Manufacturing Company (New York). The dosage indicated on the back of the bottle reads: "A wine glass full with, or immediately after, meals. Children in proportion." Malt extract was taken for its health-promoting effects and alcohol was considered by many to have medicinal effects. It's not surprising to see the 'virtues' of these three "medicines" combined into a single product.

In addition to curing the usual ailments coca wine was claimed to remedy, Bullard & Shedd's brand of coca wine claimed to be effective in curing sea sickness. It was also promoted to cure the "opium or alcohol habit."

Opiate-Containing Products

Opiate-based formulations were probably even more widely employed than those containing cocaine. Laudanum had been in use for over two centuries, and the isolation of morphine in the early 19th century (c. 1803/1817) and the later development of heroin (c. 1898) were lauded as even more effective remedies.

Modern authors usually suggest that widespread opium use was a major health problem during the 19th century. However, the use of opiates must be kept in proper perspective with other contemporary health problems. Mortality from cholera, malaria, and dysentery was very high, and opiates provided some relief from these illnesses (Opiates remain the most effective treatment for dysentery.). Some authors have suggested that the easy availability of opiate-based medicines saved more lives than it took. As the deleterious effects of chronic opiate use became increasingly recognized during the late 19th century, several factors helped ease the need for opiates: the improvements in sanitation diminished cholera and dysentery, the drainage of swamp lands decreased malaria, and the introduction of acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin; 1899) provided an alternative medicine for moderate pain relief.

This bottle of Stickney and Poor's paregoric was distributed much like the spices for which the company is better known. McCormick also manufactured and sold paregoric, which is a mixture of opium and alcohol. Doses for infants, children, and adults are given on the bottle. At 46% alcohol, this product is 92 proof which is pretty potent in itself.

Bayer heroin advertisement

Heroin was commercially developed by Bayer Pharmaceutical and was marketed by Bayer and other companies (c. 1900) for several medicinal uses including cough suppression.

This magazine advertisement is for Glyco-Heroin manufactured by Martin H. Smith Company (New York). Heroin was widely used not only as an analgesic but also as a remedy for asthma, coughs, and pneumonia. Mixing heroin with glycerin (and often adding sugar or spices) made the bitter-tasting opiate more palatable for oral consumption. (From International Medical Magazine, January, 1902.)

Heroin tablets for asthma

These Heroin tablets manufactured by The Fraser Tablet Company were marketed for the relief of asthma.

National Vaporizer opium treatment for asthma

This National Vaporizer Vapor-OL (opium) Treatment no. 6 for asthma may have provided a unique method of essentially "smoking" opium. The volatile liquid was placed in a pan that was heated by a small kerosene lamp (see below). Other substances were also used in these early (c. 1890) vaporizers, but this mixture probably ensured plenty of visitors for the spasmodically affected.

Vapo-Cresolene lamp

Vapo-cresolene lamps were marketed primarily to vaporize creosol-based products for the relief of head and chest congestion. However, they were also used with other products such as the opium-based asthma medicine shown above.

Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup trade card

Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup was an indispensable aid to mothers and child-care workers. Containing one grain (65 mg) of morphine per fluid ounce, it effectively quieted restless infants and small children. It probably also helped mothers relax after a hard day's work. The company used various media to promote their product, including recipe books, calendars, and trade cards such as the one shown here from 1887 (A calendar is on the reverse side.).

Although not required to list ingredients until the Pure Food and Drug Act was introduced in 1906, products containing opium and other narcotics were required to pay a special tax on each bottle of "medicine" and to signify that the tax was paid by sealing the unopened bottle with a tax stamp. Note the irony of portraying a child on the narcotic tax stamp used with Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup (c. 1900). (Domestically sold alcoholic beverages and tobacco products still require a tax stamp.)

Opium smoking was another common method of administering opium. Although often associated with the Chinese, opium smoking was much more widespread and especially popular with some affluent occidentals. Various media, such as this postcard from San Francisco (c. 1900), encouraged the popular stereotype. In addition to the "recreational" effects produced by smoked opium, certain medicinal effects were also produced. These effects were similar to those produced by Glyco-heroin, paregoric, and other opiate-containing medications. (cf. Vapo-OL [opium] Treatment no. 6 for asthma illustrated above.)

Students at the University of Heidelburg take a break from their studies while smoking opium (c. 1900). I suppose it makes the accordion music even more enjoyable.

Amphetamine-Containing Products

Amphetamine was synthesized too late to have the widespread applications enjoyed decades earlier by cocaine and the opiates. It was, however, marketed in products commonly used to relieve head congestion and asthma. Amphetamine continued to be employed as a popular prescription diet-aid into the 1970s.

Benzedrine inhaler

Benzedrine (racemic amphetamine) inhalers were available over-the-counter until the early 1950s. Some airlines even gave them out to passengers to minimize discomfort when the plane was landing and taking off. The Smith, Kline, and French advertisement proudly proclaims that over 10 million Benzedrine inhalers had been shipped by 1938, only 7 years after the product's introduction. This may have even outpaced McDonald's hamburger sales during their early expansion (Remember the "over x million hamburgers sold" signs on the golden arches?).

On-board service menu from an early Pan American World Airways Flight (c. 1950). Note the Benzedrine Inhalers listed under Service Items along with Kleenex and other items provided free to make your flight more pleasant.

For some products, such as coca wine, the formulations varied considerably across manufacturers. Other products also showed variations (e.g. alcohol content for paregoric ranged between 18% and 46%), but USP standardization later ensured consistent formulations among chemists and commercial manufacturers. Because opium is a natural product, early formulations using opium would have a variable opiate content, depending on growing and refining conditions (generally, opium contained 6 to 12% morphine). Later opium formulations were more consistent as chemical assays ensured more consistent opiate content.