Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.

html

Source: Sunday Times

Date: 13 September 1998

How aspirin turned hero

A hundred years ago Heinrich Dreser
made a fortune from the discovery of
heroin and aspirin - but he may have
ended his days as an addict. RICHARD
ASKWITH reports on a chemist who
prescribed heroin for coughs

THE MAN in the 100-year-old photograph is

not, to the modern eye, prepossessing.
Balding, bespectacled and clerkish, he
scarcely dominates his own portrait, let alone
the picture of him with his staff in his
laboratory.

Yet Heinrich Dreser, chemist and opportunist,

was one of the most influential men of his
age.

Between 1897 and 1914, Dreser worked for

Bayer, the former dye factory that was to
become the first of the world's pharmaceutical
giants, in Wuppertal, north-west Germany. CHEMICAL REACTION:
Dreser (seated, right) with his
Friedrich Engels was born there. While Dreser staff at Bayer, where he
made less of a mark on history, you could tested aspirin and heroin on
argue he had the greater influence on the himself
20th century. As head of Bayer's
As early as 1899, researchers
pharmacological laboratory, he was
began to report patients
responsible for the launch of two drugs that
developing 'tolerance' to the
have shaped the way we live: aspirin, the
drug, while a German
world's most successful legal drug; and
researcher denounced it as
heroin, the most successful illegal one. 'an extremely dangerous
poison'. By 1902 - when
Aspirin, of which the world now consumes 40 heroin sales were accounting
billion tablets a year, was launched 100 years for roughly five percent of
ago next February. A fanfare of publicity will Bayer's net profits - French
mark the centenary. and American researchers
were reporting cases of
The centenary of heroin is more ambiguous: 'heroinism' and addiction
it was launched in November 1898 but was
registered as a trademark in various countries
from June that year, most lucratively in the
US in August. But whenever the centenary
falls, Bayer won't be celebrating.

This is understandable; but the stories of

aspirin and heroin are intertwined, not least
through Dreser.

Born in 1860, in Darmstadt, the son of a

physics professor, he showed promise as a

1 of 8 01/07/10 2:22 PM
Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html

chemist from an early age. After receiving his

doctorate from Heidelberg University, he
worked in various laboratories before
becoming a professor at Bonn University in
1893. Four years later he joined the Bayer
Company, where he was in charge of testing
the efficacy and safety of new drugs.

Dreser was admired for his thorough,

methodical approach, and for his innovations
in testing (he was, for example, the first
chemist to use animal experiments on an
industrial scale). The credit for originating
new products for Bayer belonged, strictly
speaking, to the researcher Arthur
Eichengruen, but Dreser had the power to
decide which new products would be
developed. He had also negotiated a special
deal which guaranteed him a share of the
profits from products he launched.

In 1897 the Bayer chemist Felix Hoffmann,

acting on Eichengruen's instructions,
discovered a new process for modifying
salicyclic acid (a remedy for fever and
inflammation which unfortunately has
excruciating digestive side effects) to produce
acetylsalicyclic acid (ASA).

This compound, later to be named Aspirin,

had been isolated before and the healing
powers of salicylates (derived from willow
bark) had been known for centuries. But
Hoffmann had created a reliable process for
making it.

Eichengruen enthusiastically recommended

ASA to Dreser in 1898. Dreser, after cursory
consideration, rejected it. Ostensibly, his
objection was that ASA would have an
"enfeebling" action on the heart. "The product
has no value," he pronounced confidently. But
the real problem was almost certainly that he
had another product on his mind whose
impending success he was anxious not to
jeopardise. This was heroin.

Like aspirin, the drug that Bayer launched

under the trademark Heroin in 1898 was not
an original discovery. Diacetylmorphine, a
white, odourless, bitter, crystalline powder
deriving from morphine, had been invented in
1874 by an English chemist, C R Wright.

But Dreser was the first to see its commercial

potential. Scientists had been looking for
some time for a non-addictive substitute for

2 of 8 01/07/10 2:22 PM
Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html

morphine, then widely used as a painkiller

and in the treatment of respiratory diseases.
If diacetylmorphine could be shown to be such
a product, Bayer - and Dreser - would hit the
jackpot.

Diacetylmorphine was first synthesised in the

Bayer laboratory in 1897 - by Hoffmann, two
weeks after he first synthesised ASA. The
work seems to have been initiated by Dreser,
who was by then aware of Wright's discovery,
even though he subsequently implied that
heroin was an original Bayer invention.

By early 1898 was testing it on sticklebacks,

frogs and rabbits. He also tested it on some of
Bayer's workers, and on himself. The workers
loved it, some saying it made them feel
"heroic" (heroisch). This was also the term
used by chemists to describe any strong drug
(and diacetylmorphine is four times stronger
than morphine). Creating a brand name was
easy.

In November 1898, Dreser presented the

drug to the Congress of German Naturalists
and Physicians, claiming it was 10 times more
effective as a cough medicine than codeine,
but had only a tenth of its toxic effects. It was
also more effective than morphine as a
painkiller. It was safe. It wasn't habit-
forming. In short, it was a wonder drug - the
Viagra of its day.

"What we don't recognise now," says David

Muso, professor of psychiatry and the history
of medicine at Yale Medical School, "is that
this met what was then a desperate need -
not for a painkiller, but for a cough remedy".

Tuberculosis and pneumonia were then the

leading causes of death, and even routine
coughs and colds could be severely
incapacitating. Heroin, which both depresses
respiration and, as a sedative, gives a
restorative night's sleep, seemed a godsend.

The initial response to its launch was

overwhelmingly positive. Dreser had already
written about the drug in medical journals,
and studies had endorsed his view that heroin
could be effective in treating asthma,
bronchitis, phthisis and tuberculosis. Now
mailshots and free samples were sent out by
the thousand to physicians in Europe and the
US. The label on the samples showed a lion
and a globe. (There is a notorious brand of

3 of 8 01/07/10 2:22 PM
Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html

Burmese heroin, Double Globe, that uses

remarkably similar packaging today.)

By 1899, Bayer was producing about a ton of

heroin a year, and exporting the drug to 23
countries. The country where it really took off
was the US, where there was already a large
population of morphine addicts, a craze for
patent medicines, and a relatively lax
regulatory framework. Manufacturers of
cough syrup were soon lacing their products
with Bayer heroin.

There were heroin pastilles, heroin cough

lozenges, heroin tablets, water-soluble heroin
salts and a heroin elixir in a glycerine
solution. Bayer never advertised heroin to the
public but the publicity material it sent to
physicians was unambiguous. One flyer
described the product thus: "Heroin: the
Sedative for Coughs . . . order a supply from
your jobber."

"It possesses many advantages over

morphine," wrote the Boston Medical and
Surgical Journal in 1900. "It's not hypnotic,
and there's no danger of acquiring a habit."

But worrying rumours were surfacing. As

early as 1899, researchers began to report
patients developing "tolerance" to the drug,
while a German researcher denounced it as
"an extremely dangerous poison". By 1902 -
when heroin sales were accounting for
roughly five percent of Bayer's net profits -
French and American researchers were
reporting cases of "heroinism" and addiction.

The bandwagon took time to stop. Between

1899 and 1905, at least 180 clinical works on
heroin were published around the world, and
most were favourable, if cautious. In 1906,
the American Medical Association approved
heroin for medical use, though with strong
reservations about a "habit" that was "readily
formed".

But with the accumulation of negative reports

and the steady encroachment on the market
by other manufacturers, it was clear heroin
would never deliver the riches that Dreser
had yearned for.

Had heroin been his only pet project, this

disappointment could have spelt career
disaster. Dreser had the kind of personality
that needed commercial results to lend it

4 of 8 01/07/10 2:22 PM
Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html

plausibility. With his unfashionably formal

clothes and his habit of dragging an
overweight dachshund to work with him, he
was seen as an eccentric loner, a "difficult"
man whose ready sarcasm and autocratic
manner meant he did not want for enemies.

Luckily, although his first "baby" was showing

signs of turning into a monster, Dreser had
belatedly adopted another: aspirin.
Eichengruen, refusing to accept Dreser's
rejection of ASA, had continued to investigate
it and to lobby for its development.
Eventually, Dreser recognised which way the
wind was blowing, tested ASA on himself (as
well as on his laboratory of rabbits), and
finally published an enthusiastic scientific
paper recommending it, particularly for the
treatment of rheumatism - but omitting to
mention the contributions of Eichengruen and
Hoffmann. In February 1899, the brand name
"Aspirin" was registered, and in June, Dreser
presided over its launch.

Like heroin, aspirin more or less sold itself. As

a painkiller without undesirable side effects, it
was - and remained for decades - unique. By
the end of 1899 it was being used all over
Europe and the US, and by the time the
heroin bubble burst, aspirin had more than
filled the gap. Bayer was on its way to
becoming an industrial giant. Hoffman and
Eichengruen do not seem to have received
any special compensation for their efforts. For
Dreser, though, the rewards were
spectacular.

In 1913, Bayer decided to stop making

heroin. There had been an explosion of
heroinrelated admissions at New York and
Philadelphia hospitals, and in East Coast cities
a substantial population of recreational users
was reported (some supported their habits by
collecting and selling scrap metal, hence the
name "junkie"). Prohibition seemed inevitable
and, sure enough, the next year the use of
heroin without prescription was outlawed in
the US. (A court ruling in 1919 also
determined it illegal for doctors to prescribe it
to addicts.)

But Dreser was now earning, on top of his

"substantial" salary, more than 100 000
marks a year (about

By 1914 Dreser was an exceptionally rich

53-year-old - so much so that he decided not

5 of 8 01/07/10 2:22 PM
Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html

to renew his contract at Bayer. When war

broke out he moved to Dusseldorf as
honorary, unsalaried professor of his own
pharmacological institute at the new Medical
Academy.

Thereafter, the record becomes indistinct. His

first wife died, there were no children and, it
appears, few friends. There were rumours
that he was addicted to heroin himself.
Eventually, his health deteriorated. His last
years may or may not have been happy. But
they were certainly comfortable - which is
more than can be said for Eichengruen, who,
in his eighties, emerged from a concentration
camp to write an unpublished denunciation of
Dreser's "discovery" of aspirin.

In 1924, health problems forced Dreser to

give up his institute and he moved to Zurich,
where he remarried. That year, the US
banned the use and manufacture of heroin
altogether, even for medical purposes. (In
Britain, the medical use of heroin continues
to this day, accounting for 95 percent of the
world's legal heroin consumption.) The same
year, four days before Christmas, Dreser died.

The cause of death was given as a cerebral

apoplexy, or stroke. It is just conceivable -
had anyone known it - that he could have
averted this fate by the simple expedience of
taking an aspirin a day. If the rumours of
addiction were true, the irony is doubled:
Dreser, incorrigible in his misjudgment, had
spent his twilight years taking a daily dose of
the wrong wonder drug.

Even before its properties as a prophylactic

against circulatory disease became known,
aspirin changed the lives of millions, reducing
the sum of human misery. It also produced
untold wealth for, among others, the
shareholders of Bayer, which still earns about
R4-billion a year from the drug. (Those
"others" include the generations of lawyers
who acted in an 80-year orgy of litigation in
which the original Bayer company, having
had its American assets confiscated at the end
of World War One, fought to reclaim the right
to sell "Bayer aspirin" in the US.)

The impact of heroin is harder to assess. In

1898, there were an estimated 250 000
morphine addicts in the US - a per capita rate
roughly twice as high as today's. In Britain,
similarly, opium use was widespread,

6 of 8 01/07/10 2:22 PM
Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html

especially in East Anglia, where it was a more

or less necessary antidote to the malaria
endemic in the Fens. It was also used as a
sedative for babies. (In Britain, however,
opium seems to have been superseded not by
heroin but by other modern drugs - notably
aspirin.)

But the appearance of heroin played a crucial

role in cementing the link between drug
abuse and crime. Pharmacologically, heroin
has the same effect as morphine. But you
need only about a quarter as much to get the
same effect. It is also cheaper, quicker and
easier to use. As national and international
legislation against opiates gathered force
after 1914, addicts who wished to continue
their habit inevitably switched to heroin. By
1924, 98 percent of New York's drug addicts
were thought to be heroin addicts. With legal
channels of supply closed, criminal gangs -
first Jewish, then Italian - began to
monopolise the trade. By the end of the 30s,
the Mafia was inextricably involved.

Today, heroin use in Britain and the US is

increasing faster than at any time since the
60s: heroin seizures rose by 135 percent
between 1996 and 1997. There are thought
to be between 160 000 and 200 000 heroin
addicts in the UK, who spend almost
R30-billion a year on heroin. And the British
government spends R14-billion a year on
drug-related policies.

The other great change resulting from

Dreser's marketing of a faster-acting and
more conveniently consumed opiate has been
a change in the profile of the average opiate
abuser. In 1898, the typical morphine addict
in Britain or the US was a middle-class
woman in her forties, whereas today's typical
addict is an 18-year-old male.

***

Advertisement

7 of 8 01/07/10 2:22 PM
Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html

Heroin as a cough medicine

HOME
Heroin Inc
Paracelsus
Heroin Online
Korean Heroin
Opium Timeline
Heinrich Dreser
Hans Kosterlitz
The Plant of Joy
Solomon Snyder
Wilhelm Sertürner
Charles Baudelaire
Thomas de Quincey
The History of Heroin
Heroin and Orgasm Pills
Aldous Huxley on Heroin
Diacetylmorphine (Heroin)
Legalise Heroin says UK Police Chief
Anti-Heroin Commercial starring Rachael Leigh Cook

8 of 8 01/07/10 2:22 PM