7.11.07

Heroin history: From cough medicine for kids to Trainspotting


Lou Reed talks smack.

I've always thought of heroin as morphine's older brother (cooler, tougher, associates with delinquents, popular with the ladies, etc.), which is funny, since morphine has been around since the opium poppy or whatever plant that preceded it first evolved the ability to make the compound. Heroin, however, was not brought into existence until 1874.

Heroin was first synthesized by a dude named C.R. Alder Wright, who in addition to having lots of given names, was an English chemist employed at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. Incidentally, Wikipedia has just informed me that St. Mary's was where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin AND where Elvis Costello and Princes William and Harry were ushered into this fair world (read: born). Fascinating.

Anyway, Wright was fiddling around with morphine and decided to boil it with acetic anhydride for a couple of hours to see what would happen. This process resulted in the acetylation of the morphine, producing a semi-synthetic compound called diacetylmorphine, which was subsequently injected into a couple of dogs and rabbits, determined to be more potent than morphine, and then stuck on a shelf somewhere and forgotten. Fast forward 23 years. Another chemist, this one German, employed at Bayer, and named Felix Hoffmann, independently re-synthesized diacetylmorphine in a failed attempt to make codeine from morphine. After testing it out in some lucky humans, Bayer decided to rename the compound heroin, reportedly because it made test subjects feel, among other things, heroic.

Early on in the 20th century, heroin was marketed by Bayer as both a non-addictive replacement for morphine and the equivalent of Children's NyQuil. This approach boggles the mind. Heroin is actually considerably more addictive than morphine. Once it gets into your body, it can be deacetylated by certain enzymes back to morphine, which then does its thing on the brain and you get high. Because heroin dissolves more readily in lipid (the stuff that makes up cell membranes, AKA fat) than morphine, it is able to get from wherever you administer it into your brain more rapidly and to a greater extent. The effects of heroin are thus greater and have a faster onset relative to those of morphine, increasing it's abuse potential. Crack is more addictive than cocaine for similar reasons. It's hard to believe they sold this stuff to people to give to their kids when they developed a cough!

Eventually people started to wise up, with the US first designating heroin a controlled substance intended solely for medicinal use in 1914, and then outlawing it entirely in 1924. It's been smuggled into and secretly abused in America ever since. Heroin remains a heavily regulated legal medicine in Canada and the UK, as well as in many mainland European nations.

The illegal heroin trade originated in China in the mid-1920s. China remained a big player until it was invaded by Japan, and after the Enola Gay did her thing, the Mafia took charge of things and dominated the scene until the 1970s. As the manufacturer, Sicily was ideally situated between Central and Southeast Asia, the raw material (opium) suppliers, and Europe and the United States, the consumers. A second Mediterranean island, Corsica, also figures prominently in the history of the heroin trade. The Unione Corse (the Corsican Mafia) set up a smuggling route from Asia to the United States by way of France in the 1930s. Traffic via this route, dubbed the French Connection, peaked in the early 1970s, at which point most of the heroin found in America was the work of the Corsicans. Then the US dropped the hammer. They managed to convince the Turkish government to ban the production of opium in 1972, and along with the French, carried out a number of raids on heroin labs in France, arresting thousands and netting themselves a lot of smack. During the 1960s and 70s heroin also made it's way into the States directly from Southeast Asia, via the U.S. military in Vietnam, and from Mexico. The Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand) and the Golden Crescent smack dab in the middle of Asia (Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan) are currently responsible for most of the heroin found worldwide. It has been theorized that the CIA enabled the rise of heroin production in Southeast Asia by providing support to drug lords, although the agency likely avoided participating in any actual direct trafficking of the drug.

Heroin has ruined and cut short countless lives, including those of many famous musicians. Mike Bloomfield. Tim Buckley. Kurt Cobain. Billie Holiday. Janis Joplin. Dee Dee Ramone. Sid Vicious. Heroin addiction has been explored in a number of films, including the ever-popular Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream. I always think of the intense needle scene in Pulp Fiction after Uma Thurman snorts John Travolta's heroin. Heroin trafficking has also inspired some great films. The French Connection won a friggin' Oscar! It also figures prominently into No Country for Old Men, which kicks some serious ass.

Incidentally, if you're troubled by serious drug addiction or suffer from alcohol abuse, there are many drug treatment centers out there keen on helping you out. Rehabilitation is possible. If you are addicted to both drugs and alcohol, there is dual diagnosis rehab as well.

13 chemically inspired comments:

Anonymous said...

You seem to be ignorant of Rat Park; read it an revise your note.

Anonymous said...

Here's another link, this time to Alfred McCoy; after reading it consider revising your note. As it stands it reads as though it was written by someone who was suckled on the tit of the war on drugs fibs.

Chris said...

Dear anonymous,

While I appreciate your feedback regarding some fringe theories that I ought to look into, the next time you leave a comment, try not to be such a dick about it.

Anonymous said...

Hi Chris

I'm pleased that you're interested in the links I posted but disappointed that you have a low opinion of the research of academics at Simon Fraser and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As a scientist, what's your basis for saying that the theories are "fringe"? Do you go on how they're reported by the mainstream media? I mean, how can you reach that conclusion before reading the scientists' papers and books? You did say, "ought to look into" which suggests you haven't read their work.

Chris said...

Anonymous,

Perhaps you would find 'controversial' to be a more appropriate descriptor of their theories?

Anonymous said...

'Controversial'. No, perhaps you were correct when you said, 'fringe'. If you were talking about what is reported in the main-stream-media then you were undoubtledly correct. Scientific research, if contrary to the current political 'truth' is reported as a 'fringe' viewpoint. However, if you were talking about science then neither 'fringe' nor 'controversial' is appropriate: it just, is. Like, you know, some people did some experiments and here are the results; or, (in the case of McCoy) someone went to Asia, studied the drug trade and reported what he found.

Anonymous said...

Yeek! It wasn't meant to be an exhaustive dissertation on morphine and heroin.

I thought it was an interesting post.

Thanks.

Rob Campbell said...
This post has been removed by the author.
Rob Campbell said...

I love the blog. I especially like the reference to the new Coen bros movie. Obviously Cormac Mcarthy is obsessed with heroin - he seems to like to write about it. I have been wondering if the War in Afghanistan is hurting or helping the price of heroin?

Anonymous said...

I've heard that Afghanistan opium poppy production is 'way up since the war started, but I don't know if that leads to lower heroin prices in practice...

Anonymous said...

Hey, for what it's worth, heroin is a hell of a cough medicine. All the really ass-kicking opiates are. Codeine is a pale imitation.

Anonymous said...

This was a good post. A couple comments: the "needle scene” in Pulp Fiction is total fiction. To treat OD's a drug called narcan (naloxone) is inject intravenously or in some emergency cases intramuscular.

The Rat Park article was very interesting but had a major flaw. The results were not reproducible. (Caveat: I did not read the paper so I cannot comment on the methodology) You cannot draw any scientific conclusions from inconsistent results.

As for the McCoy work IMHO prohibition creates an illegal market that causes way more harm than the original stimulus. The problem being that vast sums of money on both sides of the legal fence make changing this reality difficult. With legalization and regulation, a major redistribution of wealth and power (namely from government agencies) would result.

michelle said...

Hmmm....very interesting, I myself did not know a whole lot about Heroin, but you have very interesting facts!