Heroin, also called diacetylmorphine, highly addictive morphine derivative that makes up a large portion of the illicit traffic in narcotics.
This would be the law until 1959 when the number of diacetylmorphine addicts doubled every 16 months between 1959 and 1968.
Users have described an intense, pleasurable rush and an acute transcendent state of euphoria after the Class A substance, which occurs after diacetylmorphine – heroin's chemical name – is metabolised into morphine in the brain.
Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company behind Alka-Seltzer and Aspirin, bought the rights to diacetylmorphine, marketing it under the name "Heroin" in 1895 because early testers said that it made them feel "heroisch" or "heroic".
In the UK, the Rolleston Committee Report in 1926 made heroin illegal and ruled that dealers were to be prosecuted, but doctors could prescribe diacetylmorphine to users when they were withdrawing from it, if it would cause harm or severe distress to the patient to go without it.
The Brain Committee recommended that only selected, specially approved doctors at specialised centres were allowed to prescribe diacetylmorphine to users in 1964.
Heroin – the chemical name for which is diacetylmorphine – was originally synthesized by British chemist C.R.Alder Wright (pictured below) in 1874, by adding two acetyl groups to the molecule morphine, which is naturally found in the opium poppy.
The Canadian researchers randomly assigned about half of the addicts to receive methadone and the other half to receive daily injections of diacetylmorphine, the active ingredient in heroin.
Diacetylmorphine is a controlled, Class A substance in the UK, but continues to be used in palliative care for the treatment of acute pain, such as in severe physical trauma, post-surgical and chronic pain, as well as relieving sufferers of terminal illnesses.
