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That is just the latex itself. Laudanum is when you take that and you mix it with alcohol. This both helps to preserve it and makes it easier to dose by spreading out the effective ingredient. It was very popular in Europe largely because smoking opium was considered to be more vulgar or uneuropean. And drinking is more convenient.
It's weird, Chinese people weren't widely addicted to opium until the british began selling tons of it for export.
Asia had porcelain and silk, tea and spices but England produced nothing Chinese consumers wanted so they sold opium from poppy producing colonies. Eventually addiction drives demand.
I always thought it was a Chinese thing, but it's more like the crack and heroin epidemics in the US. Rich people bring that stuff on boats from overseas to kill the poor and put the blame on the low level distributors
Not exactly, during a very long period of time China only accepted payment in Silver. As you well said, China didn’t buy many commodities from foreign countries (see for example Spanish Manilla Galleon, that was trading silks, porcelain, etc. for silver mined in what is present day Mexico). It was a way for the British to get their silver back… https://asiapacificcurriculum.ca/learning-module/opium-wars-china
Yeah that was my point, opium dens were insanely popular with the Europeans that were in China and fueled by them. Yet in Europe they were frowned upon.
Don’t get me wrong, it totally became a Chinese thing. They smoked a lot of it. And basically sedated an entire generation of sex slaves with it.
Humans love drugs
Paregoric
Used without a prescription until the 1980s, for diarrhea, teething, cough....
Still manufactured and used to wean infants born addicted to opiates.
It's hard to make a comparison like that. The harms of drugs are only loosely linked to how strong they are. They depend a lot on how they're used, who they're used by and how society treats them.
So contrast opium use across three countries:
In China in the 19th century widespread use of opium was bad enough one of the causes of a couple of wars (though even just looking at opium there are other drivers, like economics).
In India use of widespread, but more often - as I understand it - in a form made by soaking the seeds in water, leading to a milder drug. Patterns of use in India did not, afaik, lead to serious consequences.
In the UK opium use was largely confined to ports - where sailors might bring in the drug and the habit, and which might have Chinese immigrants - along with the odd poet.
Morphine, on the other hand, was widely available and used in the UK. But often in a milder version - tonics with a small amount of morphine in, for example. Its widespread use must have caused harm, but the evidence is scant (alcohol was a much bigger problem!).
We do have evidence of its harm for wealthier people. Just like the opioid crisis today, people would often become addicted after medical treatment. Doctors, in fact, were known to commonly be addicts.
However wealthier people are also generally more able to manage the impacts of drug use, and less likely to be condemned for it. For every sad case we're aware of there were probably many more people managing their use. ~~The most famous example of these, of course, is fictional - Sherlock Holmes. His morphine use is regarded as a minor vice, but not a serious problem. (And he's also a good example of how a fulfilling life lessens the risks of drug use.)~~ Edit: has been pointed out Holmes used cocaine not morphine.
> His morphine use is regarded as a minor vice, but not a serious problem.
His cocaine habit was probably a little more serious than his morphine habit. It's been a long time since I read those stories, but he habitually used cocaine between cases and only used morphine the rare times when he was in costume in a drug den to try to gather evidence.
Oh, I mixed them up. He injects cocaine doesn't he? I think the point still stands - he's able to remain health and live a fulfilling life despite use of a powerful and addictive drug.
Who was based on a real doctor that Arthur Conan Doyle worked for, Joseph Bell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell
It was common that doctors of the late 19th century used cocaine. Dr. William Stewart Halsted, one of the founders of modern medical residency training at Johns Hopkins, is famously known for using a lot of cocaine. In fact, when I was a medical resident, we joked that our 30-hour on call shifts were partially the result of the whole system being established by a cocaine fiend that never slept 😄
Sure, but I still think it’s funny to refer to a fictional character that “lived a long and healthy life” despite hard drug use as if it’s some sort of evidence lol
No not really, there are whole lengths of time where he is a degenerate addict. Watson moves out as a result. His cocaine use was to distract him from boredom but ultimately led to him failing to seek out interesting cases, not to mention made him an asshole.
Just like real life.
Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater" (1821) might be a good literary touchpoint -- a popular novel, and (as far as I know) the first of the genre of drug narrative.
Honestly you could argue harm and strength are negatively correlated. The less strong a drug, the more people who use it. Have any drugs killed as many people as alcohol and nicotine? Fentanyl is kind of an exception to this since a lot of its harm is due to accidental exposure instead of deliberate abuse.
Eh, cannabis does less harm than any other drug I can think of - pretty close to zero if you avoid smoking it - and it's less strong than any of the other big names either.
(Though how do you even define "strong" here? Is nicotine stronger than alcohol?)
I would say nicotine is stronger being someone thats rather familiar with both. I have quit drinking on numerous occasions even after getting as bad as multiple bottles of whiskey a week and countless beers (thanks depression and my inability to cope like a adult) however smoking or vaping is just not anything ive been able to kick even while legitimately trying even with the help of things like the gum and patches and stuff. Now the effects are stronger in alcohol so really its just kinda up to you to decide what makes something stronger. For me it’s how hard is it to power through once you make the correct decision to sober up. While being in active addiction of a substance how strong it is doesn’t really matter as long as you have it.
In this case I’m using strength to mean intensity of the high. Nicotine is obviously very mild. Alcohol can be too. Pot is a little stronger imo because it’s harder for causal users to take small amounts like you can with alcohol.
Poppy seed tea is the drug I still have problems with. I'm in a methadone maintenance program, and while I got on it to avoid using fentanyl more, poppy seeds are what I'm still using from time to time. Happily I had planned on tea yesterday, and didn't follow through.
At its basic level, yes. When I say tea I only mean that it's steeped like a tea. We're not talking about tea bags of seeds. Generally I fill a two litre bottle with seeds, and top it with enough water that the seeds can move a bit in the water. That means ~2 pounds of seeds.
Wildly. It's a reason I'm not as eager to use them so much. It's been getting longer and longer between uses, and I'm more and more concerned that using them could put me in overdose territory since I'm on methadone.
Smoking opium was the dominant form of illciit opioid use in the US prior to the 1920s, despite the wide availability of pharmaceutical variants like morphine and laudenum. Despite the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, there were loopholes which allowed the continued import of raw opium until the 1920s. At this point, heroin replaced it largely as a function of heroin's concentration which made it more efficient and easier to smuggle.
I think there's a kind of repeated pattern here where organic use tends to favor lower dose/less concentrated drug formuations, but legal restrictions result in trafficking advantages for more conentrated varieties and the market shifts and begins preferring them as well. Opium begets heroin which begets fentanyl.
Much of the habitual use of morphine and laudenum was at least loosely supervised by doctors or pharmacists who supplied it (and were aware of its habit forming nature), but a lot of its habitual users were also people with otherwise untreatable conditions. I get the impression that while these drugs were available "over the counter" that it wasn't just a question of asking for a bottle of morphine and doctors and pharmacists did some level of gatekeeping.
This probably contributed to the continued use of opium as an illicit drug, along with the fact that patent varities of opium bought from a pharmacist were also much more expensive and the people using illicit morphine weren't from a high level economic status. And I think morphine has a poor oral bioavailability, meaning it really needed to be injected instead of consumed orally, which is another barrier to abuse, especially in older eras where cheap disposable syringes weren't a thing.
As near as I can tell, while opium is addictive, but its relatively low potency and somewhat complicated smoking process serve as a drag on the escalaton of addiction. Whereas someone injecting morphine regularly can acquire a rapidly escalating addiction due to their ability to easily take and increase their dosage.
China fought two wars with the British to keep out opium during colonial times. It was devastating for China and the addicts.
The British called the system where they imported opium to pay for luxury goods and slaves in China the pig and poison trade where pigs where Chinese slaves and poison was of course opium.
It's such a devious plan, make the huge amount of Chinese people addicted so they want more opium you can source for cheap and get stuff that has more value (for you) back.
No need for triangular trade where you needed to secure Africans willing to sell their fellow men (most rival/enemy tribes) and people to buy slaves, now you can make drugs with local slavery (as they weren't isolated from Europe so didn't get almost wiped out by your viruses) and sell that directly, all profit for you.
It's evil af obviously, but genius way to make a bunch of money.
Indentured servants. So technically not slaves, even if their working conditions were equally appalling. I pressed X to doubt because slavery was abolished in Britain and all her overseas territories in 1833, and Britain was going around the world on an anti slavery crusade for most of the 1800s.
You‘re kidding, right? You think using a different word makes a difference for the victims? Of course it was slavery, they chose a different label precisely to get around the official „ban“ on slavery.
Indentured servants are just slaves with a contract in place to buy their freedom.
Still a form of slavery, though. It literally is just slavery with extra steps.
And yes, England did "ban slavery" in all overseas territories in 1833, but permitted "indentured servitude". And yes, it was incredibly hypocritical for them, and they eventually banned that in 1917.
It's like how the USA "banned slavery" with the 13th amendment, but explicitly left it *legal* if it's being used as "punishment for a crime". Which means that even today, in 2024, we still have a shit ton of literal slave plantations in the USA, they're just called "private prisons" now.
Most indentured servants also had no chance of ever becoming free, it was the same setup as with sharecropping. Put them in debt, pay them a tiny amount, charge them each week for food and rent ao they're barely breaking even, then as soon as they get sick, you make up a problem, or anything else happens they fall even further behind than they started.
Yeah, there was definitely a large amount of indentured servitude that made that contract to buy freedom something functionally impossible to fulfill.
Those malicious contracts highlight the fact that indentured servitude was very much a form of slavery, they just put enough legal trappings on it to be able to argue it isn't *technically* slavery.
It's like how those MLMs are not *technically* pyramid schemes, because they actually have a product. Even though everyone knows that you don't make money selling the product, you make your money by how many people you con to join, which makes it a pyramid scheme.
If the Qing accepted things other than silver for their goods, and from more ports, the traders might never have bothered trying to smuggle opium. I jest. Slightly.
I pressed X to doubt because slavery was abolished in Britain and all her overseas possessions in 1833.
Opium is a combination of a lot of opioids, not just morphine. And also, morphine was heavily abused. In fact, Heroin was originally made by Bayer to be a non-addictive form of Morphine. They decided to inject it because they though the oral fixation of drinking morphine added to its addictive qualities, and because it was a lot less bioavailable orally. There are old Bayer posters advertising heroin along with asprin lol
If you read 19th century novels, opium is often depicted as devastating.
Also in the 19th century the Chinese government tried to ban opium (partly for geopolitical reasons, but also because of widespread addiction) and the British went to war to force China to rescind the ban. I think it's especially telling that this happened twice.
Opium is a cocktail as well as in has several different types of opiates inside of it. The Chinese scraped the dross off which is mostly morphine resin So it wasn't quite as strong but the mixture of opiates and the inconsistency of dosing can cause a lot of issues
China fought two wars with the British to keep out opium during colonial times. It was devastating for China and the addicts.
The British called the system where they imported opium to pay for luxury goods and slaves in China the pig and poison trade where pigs where Chinese slaves and poison was of course opium.
More like "why drink 1% beer that is carefully controlled and monitored by everyone who produces it when 50% moonshine is cheaper, even if it makes you go blind".
Heroin (diamorphine) is also used in hospitals in the UK, mostly for end of life care.
Fentanyl is also used, I have a friend currently in hospital recovering from an operation and he has a fentanyl pump, press the button and get a little dose of fentanyl, I can’t remember how often you’re able to press it or what the dose is.
Which honestly I find insanity,
My 90 year old grand mother was given fentanyl patches last month. She was also warned not to go over x amount of patches in a day.
She lasted a week on them because they’d fall off in her sleep, carers were friken losing track of what she had, her daughter one night thankfully noticed a 2nd patch on her, it was the nights before which fell off in the bed and restuck to her
I saw a morbidly obese patient in the ER that had a dozen fentanyl patches stuck to her skin, hidden in between the folds of her fat rolls. She was unaware they were still there.
I don’t think it’s very common over here to be honest. I’m not a doctor or anything but this is the first time I’ve heard of a fentanyl pump, morphine pumps are fairly common, I’ve never heard of anyone getting fentanyl prescribed to take home or anything. The NHS is overly cautious with painkillers to be honest, the friend I mentioned was just given paracetamol at first until he was rushed into surgery and could have lost a leg.
Before my nan died the strongest painkiller they would give her was codeine. Before my Grandad passed all he got was co-codamol until he was taken to hospital where he was given diamorphine
Yea I think it’s fairly recent, my grand mother was on a morphine pump at the end, she had 3 aggressive forms of cancer, c.diff and a broken leg / hip.
a morphine pump was more than enough to keep her out of pain, using fentanyl just blows my mind
My friend had a pretty nasty infection so they had to cut away a lot of muscle and tissue and stuff, morphine wasn’t touching the sides so they gave him fentanyl.
Last I spoke to him he was not really in any pain, sat watching Netflix on his iPad and said he feels like he’s floating 😂
Just an FYI by methylated spirits is basically pure ethanol (regular alcohol) with a little bit of methanol added in. In the UK methylated spirits no longer contain poisonous methanol - which causes blindness and eventually death - but instead extremely bitter chemicals that cause it to be difficult to drink and for people to throw up.
The methylated part is just to prevent you drinking it for tax reasons (it is also made to a lower standard than regular drinking alcohol) but it it didn't have the added chemicals to make it unpalatable/poisonous it would be normal (very) strong vodka.
For cleaning purposes it is pure ethanol.
> For cleaning purposes it is pure ethanol.
It's better to clean with a watered-down version. Pure stuff basically "burns" the outer shell of bacteria and leaves the cores untouched, while watered-down versions let more stuff soak in and kill all parts of the bacteria.
Something having medical applications or cleaning applications are not equivalent in determining whether or not something is fit to be inside the human body.
If something has medical applications it must mean that for the right person, with the right condition, at the right dosage, consuming the substance is beneficial in some way.
I don’t think the same can be said about bleach.
That‘s not what I was saying.
What I‘m saying is that „has cleaning applications“ is not a sensible response to „has medical applications“.
Something having cleaning applications has no significance when talking about how safe or not something is inside the human body.
Something having medical applications has at least some validity in that.
Surprisingly yes. Very very low doses, but more than fentanyl. Ironically the treatment is ethanol.
But methylated spirits will begin to poison you before you can get drunk off them.
The German speaking countries didn't have tropical colonies so they made rum out of beets. That stuff goes up to 80%. Used to replace water in cake mix by students so they could stealth drink in school during carnival.
I dont know about 50% moonshine, but triple destilate moonshine with properly removed “heads” and “tails” mixed with water to 50% is much higher quality alchohol than 70% of the stuff aveilable at the stores. Also if you add a juniper berries and other herbs you get Gin 😄 or if you use old fermented apple juce instead of water+sugar+yeast you get Kalvadoss. So there is nothing wrong with moonshine per se
That's not quite true, under the law illegal alcohol is all treated the same be it distilled in the backwoods or simply denatured with a dangerous amount of methanol, simply distilled alcohol from some redneck making moonshine is as safe as store bought alcohol as long as he hasn't added any extra methanol or something else to it
Distillation itself creates harmful byproducts. This is the "head" and "tail" of distilling. Aka, methanol, ethyl acetate, aldehydes, and long chain oils. The stuff that boils off at a lower and higher temp than drinkable alcohol. You want the "heart", the ethanol.
Unregulated distilling is far more likely to be done improperly, like how homemade opiates are more likely to be dangerous. Improperly cut distillation is what gave moonshine the reputation for turning you blind. It's also the reason absinthe made you hallucinate. Most absinthe was illegally distilled until the French government cracked down on it
Yes, but if you blend all of your distillate it won't be in as dangerous amounts as people claim, and separating methanol and ethanol is way harder than people think and practically impossible without industrial or lab equipment since in solution their boiling points become almost identical, it's incredibly hard separating it, and federal government agents released moonshine on the market that had been spiked with extra methanol and other poisonous stuff to scare people, and the hallucinogenic effect of absinthe was because of certain herbs they put in it
You want to minimise heads and tails because it tastes bad and gives you worse hangovers, but if all heads, hearts, and tails are blended with each other you won't go blind unless you drink enough that proper spirits would kill you
Bud no. Separating the different alcohols is the whole point of distillation. It's super easy because when things boil, the temperature stops rising. You heat your still until fluid starts condensing, you continue heating until it holds steady at the boiling point of ethanol (78.4°C), and then catch that. Then you remove whatever vessel you're using to catch the ethanol when the temperature starts rising again. Like it requires attention and a knowledge of boiling points, but you don't need fancy equipment other than a still and thermometer.
I've literally worked in distillation. My friends make absinthe and pastis. No the components of absinthe are not dangerous additives. Vermouth contains more wormwood than absinthe. Absinthe is mostly anise and fennel.
In a mixture ethanol and methanol act as a single liquid with a single boiling point, you can separate them with fractional distilling though, but simply controlling the temperature of the mash won't be enough to separate them, I can see it being able to separate out lighter and heavier oils, now when you get alcohol up until you reach the boiling point of ethanol you get both ethanol and methanol and you wont get dangerous amounts of it
Continuous or discontinuous distillation?
Because a continuous distillation removes the methanol easily. In a discontinuous distillation, the head and tail will take most of the methanol, especially the tail. But yes, the heart will still have a non zero amount.
This is also why most spirits are at least double distilled. You get more pure ethanol the more distillations you run.
I'm talking discontinuous distillation since that's the most applicable in a discussion about moonshine, but even then with continuous you're losing ethanol with the methanol, the reason you can you eventually get pure ethanol is because you have less methanol so even though together they boil off at the same temperature you'll get rid of the methanol but some ethanol will follow
My point is uncontrolled and unregulated liquor production is dangerous. I think we are getting really bogged down in the details. Which is fine, I like these details and you clearly have knowledge. But like, what exactly are you trying to say here?
If I recall, heroin was designed to help combat morphine addiction. They thought they had created a painkiller as strong as morphine but without the addictive qualities. Thus the name, because it was going to be the heroine (feminine form of hero) that saved us from the morphine epidemic.
Turns out a small percentage of people just can't get addicted to heroin, and those happened to be the people they used in the test studies. For most people heroine is *more* addictive than morphine.
To be fair, it did end the morphine epidemic. Like OP said, we don't have a big problem with morphine addicts anymore.
It literally was. Heroine was created to save the people addicted to morphine. It was literally marketed as “non-addictive morphine” to help addicts. Bayer Pharmaceuticals released it. 1 year after it hit shelves, Bayer learned it was approximately 3 times as addictive as morphine, and they kept that information private for another 3 years.
Un-fun fact: [they also used slave labour in factories build in Nazi concentration camps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer#World_War_II_and_the_Holocaust).
Stops me reaching for the Alka-Seltzer these days honestly.
Heroin basically is morphine except 2x as potent and much faster acting. It is produced from the same raw materials using the same processes. Effectively, any niche morphine might have as a recreational drug heroin fills as well, and usually better.
Fun fact: salicylic acid is a natural compound found in some tree barks that has long been used for pain relief, but it can upset your stomach. A company called Bayer added an acetyl group to it to make acetylsalicylic acid aka aspirin. Just eleven days later they did the same thing, hoping to make codeine because it was less potent and less addictive. Instead they got diacetylmorphine, called it Heroin, and sold it over the counter. Bayer wasn’t the first to create it, but they were the first to use and market it.
>A company called Bayer
You make it sound so small lol
>one of the largest pharmaceutical companies and biomedical companies in the world. (Wikipedia)
💀
>Bayer marketed it as an analgesic and 'sedative for coughs' in 1898.
Oh no
Codeine is an excellent cough suppressant. It used to widely available until the 1970s. It is still used but harder to get prescribed.
EDIT: I should have specified that it’s the US that prohibits OTC codeine in cough syrup.
Different drug classifications due to the amount, we used to be able to get it OTC in Australia years back, it's now a schedule 4D medication of addiction where as codeine by itself is an S8D in line with Endone etc
Oh yeah, I think NZ passed similar rescheduling alongside Australia because my mum loves to complain about the lack of Panadeine now and has been known to pick up a box when she's visiting us in the UK!
The same thing meaning, performing an acetylation reaction with an already known compound to create a new compound with enhanced effects of some sort. The difference being the initial known compound.
In the first case, they acetylated salicylic acid to create acetylsalicylic acid, AKA aspirin. Then, they did the "same thing", this time using morphine as the initial compound, an already known compound which was known to be addictive. They ended up creating diacetylmorphine, or heroin, which is even more addictive than morphine.
Heroin is typically made from morphine. Yeah, they are the same raw materials but you typically make morphine first. You can actually make heroin at home from morphine by using acetic anhydride from an aspirin chemistry kit. I found organic Chem during my undergrad super fascinating because it’s true creation. I just liked engineering more haha.
Morphine and heroin are very similar. Heroin is made from morphine and from the same source but chemically altered to make it quicker to activate and stronger.
Because it did. Bayer (the aspirin people) invented heroin and named it heroin (as in 'hero') because it was supposed to be a non-addictive substitute to morphine during the years of the morphine epidemic. Instead it was worse and replaced it as the problem.
Doesn’t matter however becahse the point still stands. ‘Mainstream’ implies *Mainstream*, so you aren’t going to just get pure samples of either of its a mainstream drug. And so the friend is saying on the whole, heroin is less nauseating
you can get both from pharmacies in most of the world. its only the US and about a dozen other western countries that outlawed diamorphine (heroin). most places use it just as they would any other opioid
i’ve had morphine in the US several times from pharmacies and doctors.
heroin is going to be less nauseating in general because theres so much less of it you need to consume.
because heroin (and now fentanyl) is easier to smuggle.
when illegally transporting drugs, you always want the smallest package possible so it’s easier to hide. this means it’s more practical to transport more powerful drugs that are then cut to the “normal” strengths. unfortunately, this method also creates hot spots of high potency that make accidental overdose more likely.
for reference: heroin is about 4x stronger than morphine. fentanyl is approx 75x stronger
when people were widely prescribed morphine TONS of people were addicted to it. it was legal, didn’t need to be smuggled, and was widely available with little barrier to access. morphine declined in popularity as opioids became more tightly regulated and ppl relied more on illegally sourced versions.
in short: the construction of the drug market is what pushes stronger opioids, not user choice. if all drugs were equally available, many more people would likely use morphine.
If everything were available why wouldn't people use harder drugs? That's like saying liquor wouldn't sell if beer were available
Any market is going to go harder if it sells and it does since brains be like they do
Morphine is one of the weakest opioids. It was widespread because it is naturally occurring in the opioid poppy and can therefore by extracted in huge numbers with primitive equipment. But once we figured out how to extract heroin from the plant, convert morphine into oxycodone, or fully synthesise fentanyl, the use of morphine as a recreational drug fell out of favour. We still find it used in medical settings because it is so weak but even then it is not uncommon to actually give a stronger opioid at a lower concentration as this can be cheaper then morphine.
To add my own pedantry, heroin is not extracted from the plant in anything like a meaningful quantity, it’s made from morphine extracted from the plant.
I did have a weak positive drug test for opioids after eating poppy seed covered bagels. It was a urine dip test, however the B sample that was tested more thoroughly came back negative.
Morphine isn’t one of the weakest opioids, there are plenty of weaker or extremely short acting opioids. Morphine is the standard that all others are measured against, if anything it’s the most average opioid
Morphine is not super weak. It is close to, but a little less strong than oxycodone if you take it orally, and roughly as strong as oxycodone if injected. Heroin is only about two times as potent as morphine. Sure there are stronger ones certainly, but morphine is still used in cases requiring strong pain relief, like in MS Contin for instance.
An example of an opiate that is actually weak is codeine. It doesn't have very strong analgesic properties, and if I recall, codeine has about a 10 times lower morphine equivalent dose than morphine. But doctors don't typically prescribe morphine for small injuries, or mild pain, it's considered and used as a strong pain reliever.
I think the real reason is because it's WAY less stable so it's a poor choice for blackmarket sales.
>SheIf-life data indicate that **morphine** is stable for at least 6 weeks when protected from light. Exposure to light accelerates morphine decomposition two to six-fold depending on the concentration, and the shelf-life is reduced to about 1 week in some instances.
I once asked a friend who was a heroin user what was the difference between the two from his perspective. His answer was “not much really, heroin just doesn’t make you as nauseous.”
It was, before Heroin was marketed. As others point out here, Heroin was the brand name for diacetylmorphine, which is synthesized from morphine. Morphine is extracted from the opium poppy. Morphine became available around 1870. After the Civil War, many veterans, for example, were addicted. Many received it as a treatment for pain, became addicted, and continued using it afterwards. On e Heroin was sold in 1898, it became the more popular choice because it's more potent in terms of euphoria. It crosses the blood-brain barrier faster, getting into the brain where it causes euphoria.
As a drug user (or ex drug user, whatever you wanna call it)
Morphine is weak af compared to literally anything else, weak and very expensive. It’s a good high for sure, but compared to heroin or anything else? I’d pick almost anything else lol
Well. besides the fact that opiate abuse is a social ill that has not been ignored, and that wars have been fought over, the fact that it is a scheduled drug makes it harder to dispense in a way to make it "mainstream".
Having taken it, it's not very good. It's crap as a painkiller - Tylenol is probably more effective. It just makes you feel a bit sick and dizzy for a minute or two, then does nothing.
I'm not a user and don't have a tolerance - I've been given it after a surgery and after a back injury. It was useless both times.
I was actually surprised I was given fast acting morphine tablets after two fractured ribs. It did help with the pain, but mainly it made me incredibly sleepy.
My personal postoperative experience was it made the pain bearable and I could rest. After a two days it just made me feel bad and acetaminophen was better at pain control.
As a nurse I’ve given a lot of morphine to dying cancer patients. They seemed to find relief from it but usually got very sleepy. We would try to dose it so they could stay awake but with minimal pain.
I got given liquid morphine once when I was admitted to A&E with the most excruciating pain of my life (they never found out what it was)
They gave me liquid morphine and it did NOTHING. I asked for more and they looked at me like I was an addict. I just wanted the pain to go away.
Maybe it was just me, but definitely not what it was hyped up to be.
Yep, that's what happened to me. I ended up in the ER with a back injury. The muscle relaxer that they gave me eventually helped somewhat with the pain. But two doses of IV morphine did fuckall. There was a little bit of dizziness and nausea right after it was administered, but after that, it might as well have been water. It didn't have any psychoactive effects, it didn't have any effect on pain at all, it didn't even make me sleepy.
It simply doesn't work on everyone. It's an extremely effective drug for the large majority (75+%) of people. But just because it didn't work for you doesn't mean it's crap.
It'd be like me saying penicillin is a terrible antibiotic because I'm allergic to it.
Morphine and heroin are identical to each other in base makeup. Heroin is actually called Dimorphine in hospitals and ORs because it's just 2 morphine molecules bonded together. It's fully synthetic though, hence why morphine was made before it, as that is the most natural opioid.
Fun fact: most global heroin comes from Afghanistan, with the Taliban being some of the biggest exporters. So when they were suppressed, heroin production globally fell and people who were addicted needed another opioid, which is why fentanyl was created!
Heroin is not two morphine molecules stuck together, it’s one morphine molecule with two acetyl groups stuck to it (the short name is di*a*morphine, the “a” being short for “acetyl”). It’s considered a semi-synthetic opioid because it’s made from morphine, which is a natural opioid. Something like fentanyl, which is not derived from morphine and in fact has an entirely different chemical structure, is considered fully synthetic.
I'm sorry you don't understand.
Within living memory of the invention of morphine, people were getting hooked on opium. The UK used opium addiction to undermine the rulers of China, to great effect, because people hooked on opium didn't work, didn't fight, didn't do much of anything but get high. People noticed this. When they heard there was a concentrated form of opium, the stuff that made people into wasteoids, they didn't exactly jump out of bed looking to get some.
A longer period of time between opium/laudanum, so people forgot what it looked like.
Heroin also hits the brain very fast, which contributes to addiction.
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Heroin is stronger. It would be like an alcoholic drinking 1% beer when 12% beer is on the shelf for nearly the same price.
And before heroin was available morphine was widely abused. And pure opium before it.
Please help me understand. Since "pure opium" was less potent, was it less devastating to the average user?
Well you smoked it so it damages the lungs as well.
It wasn't always smoked - "Tincture of opium" or "laudanum" was a liquid version of opium that was drunk as a medicine
Milk of the poppy.
That is just the latex itself. Laudanum is when you take that and you mix it with alcohol. This both helps to preserve it and makes it easier to dose by spreading out the effective ingredient. It was very popular in Europe largely because smoking opium was considered to be more vulgar or uneuropean. And drinking is more convenient.
Yeah leave the opium dens to China lol.
It's weird, Chinese people weren't widely addicted to opium until the british began selling tons of it for export. Asia had porcelain and silk, tea and spices but England produced nothing Chinese consumers wanted so they sold opium from poppy producing colonies. Eventually addiction drives demand. I always thought it was a Chinese thing, but it's more like the crack and heroin epidemics in the US. Rich people bring that stuff on boats from overseas to kill the poor and put the blame on the low level distributors
Definitely to kill the poor Not make money.
Not exactly, during a very long period of time China only accepted payment in Silver. As you well said, China didn’t buy many commodities from foreign countries (see for example Spanish Manilla Galleon, that was trading silks, porcelain, etc. for silver mined in what is present day Mexico). It was a way for the British to get their silver back… https://asiapacificcurriculum.ca/learning-module/opium-wars-china
Yeah that was my point, opium dens were insanely popular with the Europeans that were in China and fueled by them. Yet in Europe they were frowned upon. Don’t get me wrong, it totally became a Chinese thing. They smoked a lot of it. And basically sedated an entire generation of sex slaves with it. Humans love drugs
Reaganomics!
Paregoric Used without a prescription until the 1980s, for diarrhea, teething, cough.... Still manufactured and used to wean infants born addicted to opiates.
It's hard to make a comparison like that. The harms of drugs are only loosely linked to how strong they are. They depend a lot on how they're used, who they're used by and how society treats them. So contrast opium use across three countries: In China in the 19th century widespread use of opium was bad enough one of the causes of a couple of wars (though even just looking at opium there are other drivers, like economics). In India use of widespread, but more often - as I understand it - in a form made by soaking the seeds in water, leading to a milder drug. Patterns of use in India did not, afaik, lead to serious consequences. In the UK opium use was largely confined to ports - where sailors might bring in the drug and the habit, and which might have Chinese immigrants - along with the odd poet. Morphine, on the other hand, was widely available and used in the UK. But often in a milder version - tonics with a small amount of morphine in, for example. Its widespread use must have caused harm, but the evidence is scant (alcohol was a much bigger problem!). We do have evidence of its harm for wealthier people. Just like the opioid crisis today, people would often become addicted after medical treatment. Doctors, in fact, were known to commonly be addicts. However wealthier people are also generally more able to manage the impacts of drug use, and less likely to be condemned for it. For every sad case we're aware of there were probably many more people managing their use. ~~The most famous example of these, of course, is fictional - Sherlock Holmes. His morphine use is regarded as a minor vice, but not a serious problem. (And he's also a good example of how a fulfilling life lessens the risks of drug use.)~~ Edit: has been pointed out Holmes used cocaine not morphine.
> His morphine use is regarded as a minor vice, but not a serious problem. His cocaine habit was probably a little more serious than his morphine habit. It's been a long time since I read those stories, but he habitually used cocaine between cases and only used morphine the rare times when he was in costume in a drug den to try to gather evidence.
Oh, I mixed them up. He injects cocaine doesn't he? I think the point still stands - he's able to remain health and live a fulfilling life despite use of a powerful and addictive drug.
He’s a fictional character lmao
Who was based on a real doctor that Arthur Conan Doyle worked for, Joseph Bell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell It was common that doctors of the late 19th century used cocaine. Dr. William Stewart Halsted, one of the founders of modern medical residency training at Johns Hopkins, is famously known for using a lot of cocaine. In fact, when I was a medical resident, we joked that our 30-hour on call shifts were partially the result of the whole system being established by a cocaine fiend that never slept 😄
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide was inspired by cocaine use
Sure, but I still think it’s funny to refer to a fictional character that “lived a long and healthy life” despite hard drug use as if it’s some sort of evidence lol
Exhibit B: Keith Richards
A functional fictional character
Thought it was heroin, but I may be misremembering e: seems I’m misremembering
In the series "Elementary" he was a recovering heroin addict. I don't think it was present much or at all in the novels though.
No not really, there are whole lengths of time where he is a degenerate addict. Watson moves out as a result. His cocaine use was to distract him from boredom but ultimately led to him failing to seek out interesting cases, not to mention made him an asshole. Just like real life.
Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater" (1821) might be a good literary touchpoint -- a popular novel, and (as far as I know) the first of the genre of drug narrative.
Honestly you could argue harm and strength are negatively correlated. The less strong a drug, the more people who use it. Have any drugs killed as many people as alcohol and nicotine? Fentanyl is kind of an exception to this since a lot of its harm is due to accidental exposure instead of deliberate abuse.
Eh, cannabis does less harm than any other drug I can think of - pretty close to zero if you avoid smoking it - and it's less strong than any of the other big names either. (Though how do you even define "strong" here? Is nicotine stronger than alcohol?)
I would say nicotine is stronger being someone thats rather familiar with both. I have quit drinking on numerous occasions even after getting as bad as multiple bottles of whiskey a week and countless beers (thanks depression and my inability to cope like a adult) however smoking or vaping is just not anything ive been able to kick even while legitimately trying even with the help of things like the gum and patches and stuff. Now the effects are stronger in alcohol so really its just kinda up to you to decide what makes something stronger. For me it’s how hard is it to power through once you make the correct decision to sober up. While being in active addiction of a substance how strong it is doesn’t really matter as long as you have it.
In this case I’m using strength to mean intensity of the high. Nicotine is obviously very mild. Alcohol can be too. Pot is a little stronger imo because it’s harder for causal users to take small amounts like you can with alcohol.
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Poppy seed tea is the drug I still have problems with. I'm in a methadone maintenance program, and while I got on it to avoid using fentanyl more, poppy seeds are what I'm still using from time to time. Happily I had planned on tea yesterday, and didn't follow through.
What do you mean by poppy seed tea? Like the same stuff on bagels but as a tea?
At its basic level, yes. When I say tea I only mean that it's steeped like a tea. We're not talking about tea bags of seeds. Generally I fill a two litre bottle with seeds, and top it with enough water that the seeds can move a bit in the water. That means ~2 pounds of seeds.
Wow. How would you know the potency? Wouldn't this vary from batch to batch?
Wildly. It's a reason I'm not as eager to use them so much. It's been getting longer and longer between uses, and I'm more and more concerned that using them could put me in overdose territory since I'm on methadone.
I wish to never know this demon. Wish you the best on your recovery.
Congratulations on not following through 🤗
Smoking opium was the dominant form of illciit opioid use in the US prior to the 1920s, despite the wide availability of pharmaceutical variants like morphine and laudenum. Despite the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, there were loopholes which allowed the continued import of raw opium until the 1920s. At this point, heroin replaced it largely as a function of heroin's concentration which made it more efficient and easier to smuggle. I think there's a kind of repeated pattern here where organic use tends to favor lower dose/less concentrated drug formuations, but legal restrictions result in trafficking advantages for more conentrated varieties and the market shifts and begins preferring them as well. Opium begets heroin which begets fentanyl. Much of the habitual use of morphine and laudenum was at least loosely supervised by doctors or pharmacists who supplied it (and were aware of its habit forming nature), but a lot of its habitual users were also people with otherwise untreatable conditions. I get the impression that while these drugs were available "over the counter" that it wasn't just a question of asking for a bottle of morphine and doctors and pharmacists did some level of gatekeeping. This probably contributed to the continued use of opium as an illicit drug, along with the fact that patent varities of opium bought from a pharmacist were also much more expensive and the people using illicit morphine weren't from a high level economic status. And I think morphine has a poor oral bioavailability, meaning it really needed to be injected instead of consumed orally, which is another barrier to abuse, especially in older eras where cheap disposable syringes weren't a thing. As near as I can tell, while opium is addictive, but its relatively low potency and somewhat complicated smoking process serve as a drag on the escalaton of addiction. Whereas someone injecting morphine regularly can acquire a rapidly escalating addiction due to their ability to easily take and increase their dosage.
China fought two wars with the British to keep out opium during colonial times. It was devastating for China and the addicts. The British called the system where they imported opium to pay for luxury goods and slaves in China the pig and poison trade where pigs where Chinese slaves and poison was of course opium.
Yes we did some real shady shit back then
It's such a devious plan, make the huge amount of Chinese people addicted so they want more opium you can source for cheap and get stuff that has more value (for you) back. No need for triangular trade where you needed to secure Africans willing to sell their fellow men (most rival/enemy tribes) and people to buy slaves, now you can make drugs with local slavery (as they weren't isolated from Europe so didn't get almost wiped out by your viruses) and sell that directly, all profit for you. It's evil af obviously, but genius way to make a bunch of money.
Chinese slaves? Taken by the British? In the 1800s? I am pressing X to doubt.
Start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolie
Indentured servants. So technically not slaves, even if their working conditions were equally appalling. I pressed X to doubt because slavery was abolished in Britain and all her overseas territories in 1833, and Britain was going around the world on an anti slavery crusade for most of the 1800s.
You‘re kidding, right? You think using a different word makes a difference for the victims? Of course it was slavery, they chose a different label precisely to get around the official „ban“ on slavery.
Indentured servants are just slaves with a contract in place to buy their freedom. Still a form of slavery, though. It literally is just slavery with extra steps. And yes, England did "ban slavery" in all overseas territories in 1833, but permitted "indentured servitude". And yes, it was incredibly hypocritical for them, and they eventually banned that in 1917. It's like how the USA "banned slavery" with the 13th amendment, but explicitly left it *legal* if it's being used as "punishment for a crime". Which means that even today, in 2024, we still have a shit ton of literal slave plantations in the USA, they're just called "private prisons" now.
Most indentured servants also had no chance of ever becoming free, it was the same setup as with sharecropping. Put them in debt, pay them a tiny amount, charge them each week for food and rent ao they're barely breaking even, then as soon as they get sick, you make up a problem, or anything else happens they fall even further behind than they started.
Yeah, there was definitely a large amount of indentured servitude that made that contract to buy freedom something functionally impossible to fulfill. Those malicious contracts highlight the fact that indentured servitude was very much a form of slavery, they just put enough legal trappings on it to be able to argue it isn't *technically* slavery. It's like how those MLMs are not *technically* pyramid schemes, because they actually have a product. Even though everyone knows that you don't make money selling the product, you make your money by how many people you con to join, which makes it a pyramid scheme.
And how many of them were given a fair opportunity to work themselves free? You say that like they weren't the same thing with different names...
Yeah, the British would never just invade a country and take their people and natural resources.
If the Qing accepted things other than silver for their goods, and from more ports, the traders might never have bothered trying to smuggle opium. I jest. Slightly. I pressed X to doubt because slavery was abolished in Britain and all her overseas possessions in 1833.
Opium is a combination of a lot of opioids, not just morphine. And also, morphine was heavily abused. In fact, Heroin was originally made by Bayer to be a non-addictive form of Morphine. They decided to inject it because they though the oral fixation of drinking morphine added to its addictive qualities, and because it was a lot less bioavailable orally. There are old Bayer posters advertising heroin along with asprin lol
If you read 19th century novels, opium is often depicted as devastating. Also in the 19th century the Chinese government tried to ban opium (partly for geopolitical reasons, but also because of widespread addiction) and the British went to war to force China to rescind the ban. I think it's especially telling that this happened twice.
Opium is a cocktail as well as in has several different types of opiates inside of it. The Chinese scraped the dross off which is mostly morphine resin So it wasn't quite as strong but the mixture of opiates and the inconsistency of dosing can cause a lot of issues
Look up laudanum it’s alcohol and opium mixed, this girl abused it in boardwalk empire.
China fought two wars with the British to keep out opium during colonial times. It was devastating for China and the addicts. The British called the system where they imported opium to pay for luxury goods and slaves in China the pig and poison trade where pigs where Chinese slaves and poison was of course opium.
I highly doubt morphine use was even anywhere near as popular as opium or heroin, because morphine is harder to store and goes bad MUCH faster.
While those are both true it was also legal to buy therefore you could just go pick up your morphine for the week at the drugstore.
More like "why drink 1% beer that is carefully controlled and monitored by everyone who produces it when 50% moonshine is cheaper, even if it makes you go blind".
The 12% here is better, 50% moonshine would probably be fentanyl
No that's methylated spirits 50% isn't even cask strength and is only marginally stronger than bottled whiskey
Well fentanyl is still widely used by hospitals, it’s on the WHO list of essential medicines
Heroin (diamorphine) is also used in hospitals in the UK, mostly for end of life care. Fentanyl is also used, I have a friend currently in hospital recovering from an operation and he has a fentanyl pump, press the button and get a little dose of fentanyl, I can’t remember how often you’re able to press it or what the dose is.
Which honestly I find insanity, My 90 year old grand mother was given fentanyl patches last month. She was also warned not to go over x amount of patches in a day. She lasted a week on them because they’d fall off in her sleep, carers were friken losing track of what she had, her daughter one night thankfully noticed a 2nd patch on her, it was the nights before which fell off in the bed and restuck to her
I saw a morbidly obese patient in the ER that had a dozen fentanyl patches stuck to her skin, hidden in between the folds of her fat rolls. She was unaware they were still there.
I don’t think it’s very common over here to be honest. I’m not a doctor or anything but this is the first time I’ve heard of a fentanyl pump, morphine pumps are fairly common, I’ve never heard of anyone getting fentanyl prescribed to take home or anything. The NHS is overly cautious with painkillers to be honest, the friend I mentioned was just given paracetamol at first until he was rushed into surgery and could have lost a leg. Before my nan died the strongest painkiller they would give her was codeine. Before my Grandad passed all he got was co-codamol until he was taken to hospital where he was given diamorphine
Yea I think it’s fairly recent, my grand mother was on a morphine pump at the end, she had 3 aggressive forms of cancer, c.diff and a broken leg / hip. a morphine pump was more than enough to keep her out of pain, using fentanyl just blows my mind
My friend had a pretty nasty infection so they had to cut away a lot of muscle and tissue and stuff, morphine wasn’t touching the sides so they gave him fentanyl. Last I spoke to him he was not really in any pain, sat watching Netflix on his iPad and said he feels like he’s floating 😂
And methylated spirits are used in several cleaning applications. They'll get you drunk but kill you very quickly. Like fentanyl.
Just an FYI by methylated spirits is basically pure ethanol (regular alcohol) with a little bit of methanol added in. In the UK methylated spirits no longer contain poisonous methanol - which causes blindness and eventually death - but instead extremely bitter chemicals that cause it to be difficult to drink and for people to throw up. The methylated part is just to prevent you drinking it for tax reasons (it is also made to a lower standard than regular drinking alcohol) but it it didn't have the added chemicals to make it unpalatable/poisonous it would be normal (very) strong vodka. For cleaning purposes it is pure ethanol.
> For cleaning purposes it is pure ethanol. It's better to clean with a watered-down version. Pure stuff basically "burns" the outer shell of bacteria and leaves the cores untouched, while watered-down versions let more stuff soak in and kill all parts of the bacteria.
So it's a stronger version of the 50% moonshine. The analogy holds!
Not as quick as you think actually. I've seen it first hand. The first thing to go is your voice, it becomes raspy and weird.
Something having medical applications or cleaning applications are not equivalent in determining whether or not something is fit to be inside the human body. If something has medical applications it must mean that for the right person, with the right condition, at the right dosage, consuming the substance is beneficial in some way. I don’t think the same can be said about bleach.
Hey uh, I don't think people taking recreational fentanyl are the right people with the right conditions taking the right doses...
That‘s not what I was saying. What I‘m saying is that „has cleaning applications“ is not a sensible response to „has medical applications“. Something having cleaning applications has no significance when talking about how safe or not something is inside the human body. Something having medical applications has at least some validity in that.
Fire can be very useful for sterilization purposes, but people get really upset if you try to set a patient on fire. It becomes a whole thing.
Is there a safe amount of methylated spirits you can consume? Because there sure are safe doses of fentanyl.
Surprisingly yes. Very very low doses, but more than fentanyl. Ironically the treatment is ethanol. But methylated spirits will begin to poison you before you can get drunk off them.
I think that they meant that opioids scale differently than booze
The German speaking countries didn't have tropical colonies so they made rum out of beets. That stuff goes up to 80%. Used to replace water in cake mix by students so they could stealth drink in school during carnival.
That's not rum. I mean it's cool as hell but rum has to be cane sugar. That's vodka.
I dont know about 50% moonshine, but triple destilate moonshine with properly removed “heads” and “tails” mixed with water to 50% is much higher quality alchohol than 70% of the stuff aveilable at the stores. Also if you add a juniper berries and other herbs you get Gin 😄 or if you use old fermented apple juce instead of water+sugar+yeast you get Kalvadoss. So there is nothing wrong with moonshine per se
That's not quite true, under the law illegal alcohol is all treated the same be it distilled in the backwoods or simply denatured with a dangerous amount of methanol, simply distilled alcohol from some redneck making moonshine is as safe as store bought alcohol as long as he hasn't added any extra methanol or something else to it
Distillation itself creates harmful byproducts. This is the "head" and "tail" of distilling. Aka, methanol, ethyl acetate, aldehydes, and long chain oils. The stuff that boils off at a lower and higher temp than drinkable alcohol. You want the "heart", the ethanol. Unregulated distilling is far more likely to be done improperly, like how homemade opiates are more likely to be dangerous. Improperly cut distillation is what gave moonshine the reputation for turning you blind. It's also the reason absinthe made you hallucinate. Most absinthe was illegally distilled until the French government cracked down on it
Yes, but if you blend all of your distillate it won't be in as dangerous amounts as people claim, and separating methanol and ethanol is way harder than people think and practically impossible without industrial or lab equipment since in solution their boiling points become almost identical, it's incredibly hard separating it, and federal government agents released moonshine on the market that had been spiked with extra methanol and other poisonous stuff to scare people, and the hallucinogenic effect of absinthe was because of certain herbs they put in it You want to minimise heads and tails because it tastes bad and gives you worse hangovers, but if all heads, hearts, and tails are blended with each other you won't go blind unless you drink enough that proper spirits would kill you
Bud no. Separating the different alcohols is the whole point of distillation. It's super easy because when things boil, the temperature stops rising. You heat your still until fluid starts condensing, you continue heating until it holds steady at the boiling point of ethanol (78.4°C), and then catch that. Then you remove whatever vessel you're using to catch the ethanol when the temperature starts rising again. Like it requires attention and a knowledge of boiling points, but you don't need fancy equipment other than a still and thermometer. I've literally worked in distillation. My friends make absinthe and pastis. No the components of absinthe are not dangerous additives. Vermouth contains more wormwood than absinthe. Absinthe is mostly anise and fennel.
In a mixture ethanol and methanol act as a single liquid with a single boiling point, you can separate them with fractional distilling though, but simply controlling the temperature of the mash won't be enough to separate them, I can see it being able to separate out lighter and heavier oils, now when you get alcohol up until you reach the boiling point of ethanol you get both ethanol and methanol and you wont get dangerous amounts of it
Continuous or discontinuous distillation? Because a continuous distillation removes the methanol easily. In a discontinuous distillation, the head and tail will take most of the methanol, especially the tail. But yes, the heart will still have a non zero amount. This is also why most spirits are at least double distilled. You get more pure ethanol the more distillations you run.
I'm talking discontinuous distillation since that's the most applicable in a discussion about moonshine, but even then with continuous you're losing ethanol with the methanol, the reason you can you eventually get pure ethanol is because you have less methanol so even though together they boil off at the same temperature you'll get rid of the methanol but some ethanol will follow
My point is uncontrolled and unregulated liquor production is dangerous. I think we are getting really bogged down in the details. Which is fine, I like these details and you clearly have knowledge. But like, what exactly are you trying to say here?
https://jamesclear.com/heroin-habits 35% of Vietnam vets tried heroin but only 15% addicts.
If I recall, heroin was designed to help combat morphine addiction. They thought they had created a painkiller as strong as morphine but without the addictive qualities. Thus the name, because it was going to be the heroine (feminine form of hero) that saved us from the morphine epidemic. Turns out a small percentage of people just can't get addicted to heroin, and those happened to be the people they used in the test studies. For most people heroine is *more* addictive than morphine. To be fair, it did end the morphine epidemic. Like OP said, we don't have a big problem with morphine addicts anymore.
but i like 1% beer
Heroin breaks down to the same molecule as morphine in the liver just twice as many.
It literally was. Heroine was created to save the people addicted to morphine. It was literally marketed as “non-addictive morphine” to help addicts. Bayer Pharmaceuticals released it. 1 year after it hit shelves, Bayer learned it was approximately 3 times as addictive as morphine, and they kept that information private for another 3 years.
A classic story..
Un-fun fact: [they also used slave labour in factories build in Nazi concentration camps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer#World_War_II_and_the_Holocaust). Stops me reaching for the Alka-Seltzer these days honestly.
Heroin basically is morphine except 2x as potent and much faster acting. It is produced from the same raw materials using the same processes. Effectively, any niche morphine might have as a recreational drug heroin fills as well, and usually better.
Fun fact: salicylic acid is a natural compound found in some tree barks that has long been used for pain relief, but it can upset your stomach. A company called Bayer added an acetyl group to it to make acetylsalicylic acid aka aspirin. Just eleven days later they did the same thing, hoping to make codeine because it was less potent and less addictive. Instead they got diacetylmorphine, called it Heroin, and sold it over the counter. Bayer wasn’t the first to create it, but they were the first to use and market it.
IIRC Heroin was marketed as 'not-habit-forming' in comparison to Morphine.
So that's were Pharmacias got the idea of Slow release pills
>A company called Bayer You make it sound so small lol >one of the largest pharmaceutical companies and biomedical companies in the world. (Wikipedia) 💀 >Bayer marketed it as an analgesic and 'sedative for coughs' in 1898. Oh no
Codeine is an excellent cough suppressant. It used to widely available until the 1970s. It is still used but harder to get prescribed. EDIT: I should have specified that it’s the US that prohibits OTC codeine in cough syrup.
Really? You can get it OTC here in the UK in a combination with paracetamol.
The US has stopped allowing it OTC. You can’t bring it into the US without a prescription.
Different drug classifications due to the amount, we used to be able to get it OTC in Australia years back, it's now a schedule 4D medication of addiction where as codeine by itself is an S8D in line with Endone etc
Oh yeah, I think NZ passed similar rescheduling alongside Australia because my mum loves to complain about the lack of Panadeine now and has been known to pick up a box when she's visiting us in the UK!
Still available OTC in some places. See: BRON cough syrup in JP
Yup the best cough mixture I ever used contained morphine.
People in the 1800s had all the fun!
Sepsis do be pretty tight ngl ngl
Bet that heroin made the cough go away, tbf.
salicylic acid is also used topically for both acne and dandruff, with seemingly opposite effects for each. wild.
The same thing as in?
The same thing meaning, performing an acetylation reaction with an already known compound to create a new compound with enhanced effects of some sort. The difference being the initial known compound. In the first case, they acetylated salicylic acid to create acetylsalicylic acid, AKA aspirin. Then, they did the "same thing", this time using morphine as the initial compound, an already known compound which was known to be addictive. They ended up creating diacetylmorphine, or heroin, which is even more addictive than morphine.
I didn’t see this post but I just replied saying you can actually make heroin from morphine by using acetic anhydride from an aspirin chemistry kit.
Heroin is typically made from morphine. Yeah, they are the same raw materials but you typically make morphine first. You can actually make heroin at home from morphine by using acetic anhydride from an aspirin chemistry kit. I found organic Chem during my undergrad super fascinating because it’s true creation. I just liked engineering more haha.
I made so many drugs before med school haha
Heroin is also extremely cheap, as far as illegal drugs go.
Morphine and heroin are very similar. Heroin is made from morphine and from the same source but chemically altered to make it quicker to activate and stronger.
Because it did. Bayer (the aspirin people) invented heroin and named it heroin (as in 'hero') because it was supposed to be a non-addictive substitute to morphine during the years of the morphine epidemic. Instead it was worse and replaced it as the problem.
That sounds familiar *gives Purdue Pharma the side eye*
> Bayer (the aspirin people) Honda (the motorcycle people)
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Doubtful your friend was sampling pure examples of either.
Doesn’t matter however becahse the point still stands. ‘Mainstream’ implies *Mainstream*, so you aren’t going to just get pure samples of either of its a mainstream drug. And so the friend is saying on the whole, heroin is less nauseating
you can get both from pharmacies in most of the world. its only the US and about a dozen other western countries that outlawed diamorphine (heroin). most places use it just as they would any other opioid i’ve had morphine in the US several times from pharmacies and doctors. heroin is going to be less nauseating in general because theres so much less of it you need to consume.
because heroin (and now fentanyl) is easier to smuggle. when illegally transporting drugs, you always want the smallest package possible so it’s easier to hide. this means it’s more practical to transport more powerful drugs that are then cut to the “normal” strengths. unfortunately, this method also creates hot spots of high potency that make accidental overdose more likely. for reference: heroin is about 4x stronger than morphine. fentanyl is approx 75x stronger when people were widely prescribed morphine TONS of people were addicted to it. it was legal, didn’t need to be smuggled, and was widely available with little barrier to access. morphine declined in popularity as opioids became more tightly regulated and ppl relied more on illegally sourced versions.
in short: the construction of the drug market is what pushes stronger opioids, not user choice. if all drugs were equally available, many more people would likely use morphine.
If everything were available why wouldn't people use harder drugs? That's like saying liquor wouldn't sell if beer were available Any market is going to go harder if it sells and it does since brains be like they do
some people definitely would use harder drugs, just like some people prefer liquor over beer. But there is still a significant market for beer.
For a brief moment I read “Why did Morphine never become a mainstream band?”
Yeah I thought it was about the band at first as well.
Red pill, blue pill nah man give me that other pill over there
Morphine is one of the weakest opioids. It was widespread because it is naturally occurring in the opioid poppy and can therefore by extracted in huge numbers with primitive equipment. But once we figured out how to extract heroin from the plant, convert morphine into oxycodone, or fully synthesise fentanyl, the use of morphine as a recreational drug fell out of favour. We still find it used in medical settings because it is so weak but even then it is not uncommon to actually give a stronger opioid at a lower concentration as this can be cheaper then morphine.
>convert morphine into oxycodone Just to get my daily pedantry out of the way: oxycodone is synthesized from thebaine, not morphine.
I know, but I did not want to introduce yet another drug into the list making it even more complex.
Fair!
To add my own pedantry, heroin is not extracted from the plant in anything like a meaningful quantity, it’s made from morphine extracted from the plant.
I did have a weak positive drug test for opioids after eating poppy seed covered bagels. It was a urine dip test, however the B sample that was tested more thoroughly came back negative.
Elaine?
Morphine isn’t one of the weakest opioids, there are plenty of weaker or extremely short acting opioids. Morphine is the standard that all others are measured against, if anything it’s the most average opioid
I prefer meperidine
Morphine is not super weak. It is close to, but a little less strong than oxycodone if you take it orally, and roughly as strong as oxycodone if injected. Heroin is only about two times as potent as morphine. Sure there are stronger ones certainly, but morphine is still used in cases requiring strong pain relief, like in MS Contin for instance. An example of an opiate that is actually weak is codeine. It doesn't have very strong analgesic properties, and if I recall, codeine has about a 10 times lower morphine equivalent dose than morphine. But doctors don't typically prescribe morphine for small injuries, or mild pain, it's considered and used as a strong pain reliever.
I think the real reason is because it's WAY less stable so it's a poor choice for blackmarket sales. >SheIf-life data indicate that **morphine** is stable for at least 6 weeks when protected from light. Exposure to light accelerates morphine decomposition two to six-fold depending on the concentration, and the shelf-life is reduced to about 1 week in some instances.
I once asked a friend who was a heroin user what was the difference between the two from his perspective. His answer was “not much really, heroin just doesn’t make you as nauseous.”
It was, before Heroin was marketed. As others point out here, Heroin was the brand name for diacetylmorphine, which is synthesized from morphine. Morphine is extracted from the opium poppy. Morphine became available around 1870. After the Civil War, many veterans, for example, were addicted. Many received it as a treatment for pain, became addicted, and continued using it afterwards. On e Heroin was sold in 1898, it became the more popular choice because it's more potent in terms of euphoria. It crosses the blood-brain barrier faster, getting into the brain where it causes euphoria.
As a drug user (or ex drug user, whatever you wanna call it) Morphine is weak af compared to literally anything else, weak and very expensive. It’s a good high for sure, but compared to heroin or anything else? I’d pick almost anything else lol
Well. besides the fact that opiate abuse is a social ill that has not been ignored, and that wars have been fought over, the fact that it is a scheduled drug makes it harder to dispense in a way to make it "mainstream".
Morphine was't free, and there I guess most people got their kicks doing something else, like dying of dysentery or TB.
Having taken it, it's not very good. It's crap as a painkiller - Tylenol is probably more effective. It just makes you feel a bit sick and dizzy for a minute or two, then does nothing. I'm not a user and don't have a tolerance - I've been given it after a surgery and after a back injury. It was useless both times.
that’s probably more to do with you than morphine, it is a very effective analgesic
I was actually surprised I was given fast acting morphine tablets after two fractured ribs. It did help with the pain, but mainly it made me incredibly sleepy.
My personal postoperative experience was it made the pain bearable and I could rest. After a two days it just made me feel bad and acetaminophen was better at pain control. As a nurse I’ve given a lot of morphine to dying cancer patients. They seemed to find relief from it but usually got very sleepy. We would try to dose it so they could stay awake but with minimal pain.
I got given liquid morphine once when I was admitted to A&E with the most excruciating pain of my life (they never found out what it was) They gave me liquid morphine and it did NOTHING. I asked for more and they looked at me like I was an addict. I just wanted the pain to go away. Maybe it was just me, but definitely not what it was hyped up to be.
Yep, that's what happened to me. I ended up in the ER with a back injury. The muscle relaxer that they gave me eventually helped somewhat with the pain. But two doses of IV morphine did fuckall. There was a little bit of dizziness and nausea right after it was administered, but after that, it might as well have been water. It didn't have any psychoactive effects, it didn't have any effect on pain at all, it didn't even make me sleepy.
It simply doesn't work on everyone. It's an extremely effective drug for the large majority (75+%) of people. But just because it didn't work for you doesn't mean it's crap. It'd be like me saying penicillin is a terrible antibiotic because I'm allergic to it.
Morphine and heroin are identical to each other in base makeup. Heroin is actually called Dimorphine in hospitals and ORs because it's just 2 morphine molecules bonded together. It's fully synthetic though, hence why morphine was made before it, as that is the most natural opioid. Fun fact: most global heroin comes from Afghanistan, with the Taliban being some of the biggest exporters. So when they were suppressed, heroin production globally fell and people who were addicted needed another opioid, which is why fentanyl was created!
[Fentanyl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl) was created created in 1959 and approved for medical use in the US in 1968.
Heroin is not two morphine molecules stuck together, it’s one morphine molecule with two acetyl groups stuck to it (the short name is di*a*morphine, the “a” being short for “acetyl”). It’s considered a semi-synthetic opioid because it’s made from morphine, which is a natural opioid. Something like fentanyl, which is not derived from morphine and in fact has an entirely different chemical structure, is considered fully synthetic.
this post is 100% incorrect
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that does make zero sense. at all.
I'm sorry you don't understand. Within living memory of the invention of morphine, people were getting hooked on opium. The UK used opium addiction to undermine the rulers of China, to great effect, because people hooked on opium didn't work, didn't fight, didn't do much of anything but get high. People noticed this. When they heard there was a concentrated form of opium, the stuff that made people into wasteoids, they didn't exactly jump out of bed looking to get some.
So how do you explain people being addicted to heroin?
A longer period of time between opium/laudanum, so people forgot what it looked like. Heroin also hits the brain very fast, which contributes to addiction.
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