HEROIN-FROM BUNKER 13

Aniruddha Bahal

It was during that period (Renaissance) in the sixteenth century that the Swiss-German physician Bambastus von Hahenheim accomplished the pharmacological breakthrough of producing a tincture of opium by mixing it with alcohol and calling it laudanum. The concoction saturated Europe and civilization was on track for sedation on a mass scale. The following generations fiddled with Hahenheim’s pharmacological forerunner, which became the indispensable tool of medicine in the eighteenth century.

In 1805, however, it was left `to another German, Frederick Serturner, to isolate the alkaloid of morphine from opium. This separation of the principal ingredient from the parent compound was a dazzling feat. It unleashed into the market a drug ten times more powerful than opium. There was another first for Germany, when Bayer company started the commercial production of heroin in 1898.

Heroin wasn’t Germany’s only area of chemical triumph. In 1855, the German physicist Frederick Gaedcke isolated the active principle of cocaine. World War II also saw the invention of methadone as a substitute for Heroin in Germany.