Who Invented Heroin

Why was heroin invented?

At the time heroin was invented, the only effective medication for pain, diarrhea and coughing was morphine. Unfortunately, many people became addicted to morphine. In response, many chemists tried to create something safer. In the quest to find morphine’s replacement, heroin was invented.

Famous quotes about heroin

Who invented heroin?

The person who invented heroin a.k.a. diacetylmorphine, which was originally made by mixing anhydrous morphine with acetic anhydride and boiling it for several hours, was C.R. Alder Wright way back in 1874.

How Strong Is Heroin?

It turned out that heroin was 2-3 times stronger than morphine. When Wright realized that heroin was that much stronger, he knew it was unsafe, and so he decided to tuck his notes away forever. Unfortunately, he decided to publish it first. His notes were published in a local trade journal – The Chemical and Pharmaceutical Journal. That article turned out to be Wright’s second misstep. Decades later, another person would read Wright’s article and subsequently change the world forever.

Big pharma

Almost twenty-five years after C.R. Alder Wright tucked away his notes, and just a few years after his death, another man named Heinrich Dreser came across Wright’s formula in an old copy of the Chemical and Pharmaceutical Journal. Dreser knew that he might have stumbled upon something that could make the company and himself rich. He asked his colleague Felix Hoffman if he would take time out of his busy schedule to verify that the formula worked. Unfortunately for Dreser, Hoffman was busy working on his own new drug, which he had recently named “Aspirin.” Dreser pleaded with Hoffman to temporarily halt his work on Aspirin, and Hoffman begrudgingly agreed. In short order, both Hoffman and Dreser knew they found a brand new drug that would make them and the company a lot of money. This moment in history is considered the infancy of Big Pharma. Some even say that Big Pharma began in the year 1898, the same year that Bayer began worldwide distribution of HEROIN.

Dreser and Hoffman worked for Bayer pharmaceuticals, a company headed by Carl Duisberg. In June, 1898, Carl Duisberg renamed diacetylmorphine under Bayer’s trademark name “Heroin,” and began marketing it as a safe and non-habit-forming cough remedy for children. Within a year, Bayer was exporting it across the globe to about 23 nations. Soon after, physicians and scientist began reporting of its habit-forming effects. When Carl Duisberg heard of those reports he quipped, “that one had to silence the opponents.”

The first nation where heroin addiction seems to have become a major problem was the United States. The main site of that addiction problem was New York City where 98 per cent of all drug addicts were reported to be heroin addicts. We now know, that heroin is a prodrug of morphine, which means it’s 2-3 times stronger than morphine, and equally more addictive.

Bayer and Heroin

Mr. Dreser is often credited with inventing heroin, but what he really did was steal the work of C.R. Alder Wright, call it “HEROIN”, and sell it to the public as a safe non-habit-forming cough remedy. Ironically, the person most responsible for bringing HEROIN to the world, Mr. Heinrich Dreser, died of a stroke at age 64, a lonely heroin addict.

The first heroin addict

Dreser could be the world’s first heroin addict. We know he died a heroin addict. We also know that he tested it on himself prior to shipping it around the world. It is plausible that he inadvertently became the world’s first heroin addict.

Heinrich Dreser, Felix Hoffman and Carl Duisberg of Bayer Pharma AG all conspired to sell heroin to the public as a safe medication. That decision has since led to the deaths of millions upon millions of people across the globe.