heroin history, heroin discovery, early heroin use till now.
History of heroin use
Heroin was first synthesised in 1874 by C.R.A. Wright, a British chemist working at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, London. He had been experimenting with combining morphine with various acids. He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride over a stove for several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine. We now call it diacetylmorphine. The compound was sent to F.M. Pierce of Owens College, Manchester, for analysis. He reported the following to Wright.
Doses ... were subcutaneously injected into young dogs and rabbits ... with the following general results ... great prostration, fear, and sleepiness speedily following the administration, the eyes being sensitive, and pupils dilated, considerable salivation being produced in dogs, and slight tendency to vomiting in some cases, but no actual emesis. Respiration was at first quickened, but subsequently reduced, and the heart's action was diminished, and rendered irregular. Marked want of coordinating power over the muscular movements, and loss of power in the pelvis and hind limbs, together with a diminution of temperature in the rectum of about 4 degrees (http://adhpage.dilaudid.net/heroin.html)
Heinrich Dreser (who discovered aspirin), of Bayer in Elberfeld, Germany, noticed that diacetylmorphine was more potent than morphine. Bayer registered Heroin (meaning 'heroic treatment' from the German word heroisch) as a trademark. From 1898 through to 1910 it was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. As with Aspirin, Bayer lost some of its trademark rights to Heroin following World War I.
In 1924 the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act made it illegal to manufacture or possess heroin in the United States.
heroin production and trafficking
Heroin is a controlled substance produced for the market through opium refinement processes. Traffic is heavy worldwide, with the biggest producer being Afghanistan, which after a ban on poppy growing by the Taliban in 2001 dropped its production by 95% but revived it to record numbers following the US military occupation and fall of the Taliban government. Currently, 86% of the global heroin supply is cultivated in Afghanistan, up from 75% in 2003 according to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime. The estimated value of the 2003 harvest is 2.8 billion USD.
Some observers, particularly political conservatives in the United States, have accused China of being a leading producer of heroin, but the facts do not appear to back up these claims.
Heroin is one of the most profitable illicit drugs since it is compact and easily concealed. At present, opium poppies are mostly grown in the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and in Asia, especially in the region known as the Golden Triangle straddling Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Yunnan province in China. There is also cultivation of opium poppies in the Sinaloa region of Mexico and in Colombia. The majority of the heroin consumed in the United States comes from Mexico and Colombia.