The Advent of Heroin
Whatever the route of
The year 1874 was a turning point in the history of opiate addiction due to the discovery of heroin by British chemist C.R. Alder Wright. He found that boiling morphine with acetic anhydride produced diacetylmorphine, or heroin. Soon heroin found its way into patent medicine remedies to compliment the morphine and codeine mixtures already available.
Heroin powder proved to be more potent and addictive than the opium-based laudanum most women drank. It was easily dissolved in liquid and was initially thought to be non-addictive. More important, heroin powders became available at local pharmacies, and the practice of self-injection began to claim lives as a result of overdoses. The practice of selling patent medicine containing morphine, opium, and heroin had no legal regulation in this country until 1906 when the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed.
During the last twenty-five years of the 1800s, a backlash against the increasing use of drugs, both legal and illegal, began to occur. It had become apparent that drug use was a grave social problem in America. Between 1875 and 1877 the country¢s first opium laws were passed in San Francisco, California; Virginia City, Nevada; and Portland, Oregon. The laws were primarily aimed at outlawing the opium dens that had proliferated with Chinese immigration. It was not until 1887 that Congress passed a bill prohibiting the importation of opium by both US and Chinese citizens. The law created a black market for opium in its crude, sociable form and ignored the opium derivatives morphine and later heroin, which were claiming the souls of thousands of men and women.
A serious problem faced by reformers and prohibitionists was the economic power that the chemical companies had achieved. The companies were among the largest advertisers in the newspapers of the day. Newspapers were reluctant to point out the addictive qualities of some of the patent medicines because the companies had escape clauses built into their advertising contracts allowing the to pull their business if their products were banned from sale. Thus, consumers continued to drink patent medicine remedies with innocent sounding names, unaware of the addictive contents, until the Pure Food and Drug Act required labeling and disclosure of all ingredients.
Heroin was introduced under its own brand name as a cough suppressant by the forty-eight-year-old German chemical-pharmaceutical company Farbenfabriken Vorm Friedrich Bayer and Company in 1898. It was available as a powder, diluted in liquids, and also available in powder capsules. Users could swallow or inject the powerful new drug. Heroin was indicated as a medicine for chest pain, pneumonia, tuberculosis, among other maladies. It was widely advertised as a general cure for common ailments of the day, and its use was unrestrained. The year following its introduction, Bayer and Company introduced a less harmful analgesic, acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin as it is known commercially, and marketed it under the brand name Bayer Aspirin. Ironically, this new analgesic was available only by prescription when it was introduced.
Source: Heroin by Humberto Fernandez