About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the twenty-first century.
It was 1898. The German chemical company, Bayer, launched a new medicine called “Heroin.”
It was called heroin because, at the time, opinion held the “best” medicine was “heroic medicine.” Heroic medications were opium, morphine, cocaine, and heroin, and heroic measures were bleeding and amputation. Neither the medication nor the measures would survive as optimum.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, natural materials were used in medicines. Then chemists learned to isolate and analyze the ingredients and synthesize them. Synthesized drugs were more uniform and therefore dosage was easier to prescribe.
The first such medicine was synthesized in Germany. In 1805 Friedrich Sertumer synthesized a painkiller from opium and called it morphium after Morpheus the Greek God of dreams. Its name was shortened to morphine as its effectiveness as a painkiller was heralded; only later was its addictive quality discovered.
Ironically, heroin was invented as the alternative to morphine. It was intended as a painkiller and soporific, and worked as effectively as the opium derivative morphine. The difference was supposed to be that morphine was addictive and heroin was not.
For a while, heroin was considered a panacea, and prescribed (unbelievably) as “demorphinisation” — the cure for morphine addiction. Heroin was also prescribed for coughs and other symptoms associated with chest and lung diseases – principally consumption (TB) and pneumonia. Both diseases were killers, and there was a cure for neither so the medical profession had to be content with alleviating symptoms. Heroin did that.
Doctors were thrilled. However, not long after the turn of the century, the addictive property of heroin was discovered and withdrawal was found to be worse than from morphine. Still doctors persisted in its use. Before antibiotics, there was no cure or relief from dreaded chest and lung diseases. The pain was significant and prevented sufferers from sleeping. Heroin was a “dream maker,” a sleep enabler, and doctors were loath to stop using it.
Invented in 1898, by 1906 treatments for heroin addiction were being contemplated. That year. there were also suggestions that its use be banned. However other members of the medical community disagreed.
An American doctor said, “I feel that bringing charges against heroin is almost like questioning the fidelity of a good friend. I have used it with good results.”
John Jacob Astor pooh-poohed the negative side effects of narcotics and got into the opium trade.
America is and was the world capital of commercialization. When these synthesized drugs (and their natural counterparts) hit our shores, every would-be entrepreneur concocted products containing heroin, morphine, opium, and cocaine. There were hundreds of these products sold over the counter in drug stores, and peddled door to door. It was loudly proclaimed that they were restoratives and cure-alls.
Addiction as a possible side effect was hotly denied publicly. Privately, purveyors asked, “How is addiction a problem? It guarantees future sales.”
The most popular product of the type, the one with longevity, had cocaine as its basic ingredient. This “elixir,” this “patent medicine,” was called Coca-Cola.
Soon the party was over. The first step in controlling sale and use of the patent medicines was to require that labels showed ingredients. Narcotics – the numb-makers, the sleep-inducers – were vilified and sales dropped. Companies, including Coke, stopped using those ingredients. Those who continued to add narcotics to their products were taxed.
Then as now, whether discouraging the use of tobacco, alcohol, or narcotics, the government takes the same steps. First, the government labels and then taxes so that the public knows what they are using, what the side effects are, and then to pay more for the product. Knowledge and increased cost decreases sales.
Meanwhile, back in Germany, another occurrence greatly decreased the desire for heroin; a second invention trumped the first. A year after synthesizing heroin, the Bayer Company synthesized a second painkiller and called it “aspirin.” Bayer dropped production of heroin.
The final step a government takes to control a substance is to criminalize its sale and use. In 1920 the “Dangerous Drug Act” was passed in Europe as part of the post World War I Treaty of Versailles. In 1919 American doctors were forbidden to prescribe certain narcotics, and in 1924 the manufacture and the possession of heroin were made illegal.
The government takes the same steps and the result is the same: manufacture and distribution of drugs fall into the hands of the criminal world.
With heroin the transition was almost immediate. In 1924 an article called heroin “a vice of the underworld” available only through “vicious associations.”
A study two years later declared “heroin use is more plentiful than ever before.”
Seventy-two years later, in 1998, a study concluded China, Nigeria, Colombia, and Mexico “are aggressively marketing heroin in the United States and Europe.”
According to an The Edge article by Heather Bellow on August 14, to increase market share, the crooks are now reversing the process governments institute to control sale and use: drug peddlers hide the ingredients, lie about the side effects, and lower the prices.
