"[Heroin is] not hypnotic, and there is no danger of acquiring a habit."
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (1900)
Throughout the nineteenth century, scientists sought a non-addictive substitute for the painkiller morphine. Morphine itself was first derived from the seeds of the white Indian poppy (Papaver somniferum) in 1803 by German pharmacist Friedrich Serturner. Heroin was first processed in 1874 by C. R. Alder Wright, a chemist working at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, London. He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride over a stove for several hours and produced a more potent form of morphine, diacetylmorphine.
But heroin only became popular after it was independently re-synthesized twenty-three years later by Felix Hoffmann (1868-1946), a German chemist working at the Bayer pharmaceutical company. When the drug was tested on Bayer workers, they said it made them feel "heroic," leading to the name heroin. From 1898to 1910 Bayer marketed heroin as a cure for morphine addiction, and as a component of cough pastilles and elixir because it decreased respiration. By 1899, Bayer was producing around a ton of heroin a year, and exporting it to twenty-three countries.
Then, somewhat to Bayer's embarrassment, it was found that heroin is converted to morphine when metabolized in the liver, and is basically only a quicker acting, more potent form of the drug. In 1914 use of heroin without prescription was outlawed in the United States, with a court ruling in 1919 determining that it was illegal for doctors to prescribe it to addicts.
Today heroin abuse is a serious problem for many countries in the world. Its use in medicine is also Strictly controlled for instances of severe pain.
