A heroin chronology
07/13/97

To better understand the new surge in heroin use, it's helpful to
examine the opiate's family history.

2000 B.C. Opiates were first used to ease pain and suffering. The
Sumerians, Egyptians and Chinese noted the paradoxical nature of opium,
recording it as a cure for all illness, a pleasurable substance and a
poison.

It's believed that early Greek and Egyptian cultures used extracts from
the opium poppy to prevent the "excessive crying of children." A drug of
"forgetting" was described in detail in Homer's Odyssey. The Greek
physician Galen praised opium to cure headaches, deafness, epilepsy,
asthma, coughs, colic, fevers, women's problems and melancholy. In those
days, opium cakes and candies were sold in the streets.

The opium poppy (papaver somniferum) was named after Somnis, the Roman
god of sleep, because the drug was often used to induce sleep. The abuse
potential initially was low because the extract from the poppy was taken
only by mouth and had a bitter taste.

A.D. 47610th century The Arabic world embraced opium in the Middle
Ages because the Koran forbade the use of alcohol. Those Middle East
merchants traded opium with India and China. By the 10th century, opium
showed up in Chinese medical writings.

About this time Arab physicians such as Avicenna began writing about the
"other side" of the opium family addiction. Tellingly, he died as a
result of drinking too much of a mixture of opium and wine.

16th century A clinician named Paracelsus cooked up an opium potion
with saffron, cinnamon, cloves and Canary wine and called it laudanum.
It was widely used as a panacea from the 16th through 18th centuries in
Europe. Those who became hooked on laudanum's charms were known as
"opium eaters" and included literary figures Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

19th century Although opium had been introduced in China, it was used
only moderately until the introduction of tobacco and the discovery that
the two could be combined and smoked. To curb the druginduced haze,
China passed laws in 1729 that opium dealers be strangled. But opium was
being poured into China by the British and American traders who brought
opium from India and exchanged it for silk and spices. When the Chinese
dumped millions of dollars worth of the toxic opium into the sea in
1839, the Brits crushed them in the Opium Wars and won Hong Kong as part
of the payment for the opium loss.

In a parallel development, in 1805 a German pharmacist's assistant
isolated the primary active agent in opium. It was 10 times as potent.
He named it morphine after the god of dreams, Morpheus. By 1832, a
second key opium product, codeine, was developed and named after the
Greek word for poppy head.

Morphine's use as a painkiller was multiplied dramatically by the
perfection of the hypodermic syringe in 1853. It was believed
mistakenly that injecting the drugs would not be as addictive as oral
use.

Throughout the last half of the 1800s, the use of morphine was spread by
military medicine in wars in the United States and Europe. So many
returning veterans from the Civil War were addicted to morphine that the
illness was later called "soldier's disease."

Then along came heroin, the most potent opiate family member of all. In
1898, Bayer Laboratories marketed heroin, a variation of morphine, as a
cough remedy and painkiller. It was three times as potent as morphine
and faster acting. Because it was initially ingested orally in smaller
doses, it was believed to not be habitforming, a perfect drug. This
proved wrong again.

By the end of the 19th century, three forms of opiate addiction had
developed in the United States: the oral intake of "patent medicines"
created from opium such as laudanum, opium smoking that was brought by
Chinese laborers to the West Coast, and the injection of morphine. At
the beginning of this century, it was estimated that 1 percent of the
U.S. population was hooked on the poppy family products.

20th century Concern about the opiates led to the first war on drugs.
The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, and the Harrison Act in
1914. By 1915 the Supreme Court had ruled that possession of smuggled
opiates was a crime.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, opiates like heroin were primarily used by
entertainers, racketeers, thieves, prostitutes and pimps. Then came the
rock 'n' roll of the 1960s and the Vietnam War. It was estimated that 5
to 15 percent of the American troops in Vietnam became addicted because
of the ready availability of recreational heroin. It took a massive
military drug testing and treatment program to bring the number down to
1 to 2 percent.

Today there are an estimated 300,000800,000 heroin abusers in the U.S.
There are an estimated 5 million to 10 million worldwide. What has
changed dramatically, however, is that the newest users are teenagers.

(Sources include Uppers, Downers, All Arounders, by Darryl S. Inaba and
William E. Cohen, and Drugs, Society and Human Behavior, by Oakley Ray
and Charles Ksir.)