An Early History of Opioids
The origins of opium date as far back as 3400 BCE in the ancient region of Mesopotamia. The opium poppy was also found referenced in ancient texts from Egyptian, Sanskrit, Greek, Minoan and Sumerian cultures. The Sumerians would refer to it as the aptly named ‘hul gil’, which means ‘plant of joy’. During the nineteenth century, when the Wild West of America was being settled and the railroad was under construction, a lot of immigrant workers were imported from China. These Chinese labourers brought with them opium, a substance that would catch on like wildfire. The images we see projected on film of a cowboy at the saloon drinking whiskey may have been a common sight in the movies and on television, but it was perhaps even more common in real life to find legendary characters like Wild Bill Hickock in a dimly lit opium den, high out of his mind.
The next stage in the story of opium was morphine. Originally named morphium, for the Greek god Morpheus (the god of dreams), the alkaloid that would become morphine was first isolated from the opium poppy by pharmacist’s apprentice Friedrich Sertürner sometime between 1803 and 1805. It was the very first time any alkaloid had been isolated from a plant. Morphine was later introduced to the marketplace for consumption by Merck in 1827. It was the shortcomings in morphine that would lead to the creation of heroin.
Medicine vs Snake Oils
You’ve no doubt heard the term ‘snake oil’ or ‘snake oil salesman’, at least in passing. While it’s a cliché for a hoax nowadays, these elixirs were a very real and commonly used cure-all remedy throughout the 1700s and 1800s. The Victorian era was rife with quack medicine that made all sorts of claims, none of which needed to be proved by any government regulation until 1858 in the United Kingdom, and after the turn of the twentieth century in the United States.
When we think about snake oil today, what often comes to mind is a placebo or a hoax medicine that doesn’t actually work. That wasn’t necessarily always the case. While we didn’t have a lot of the established medicines in the nineteenth century that we have now, many of the remedies that were used did have a medical basis. Bayer would initially market their heroin product like snake oil, which will be explored later in this chapter.
A few of the more famous, or rather infamous, snake oils were ‘Richard Stoughton’s elixir’, ‘Worner’s Famous Rattlesnake Oil’ and ‘Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil’. Richard Stoughton’s elixir was one of the first bitters to receive a patent in England, back in 1712. The ingredients are said to have included the rinds of oranges, an ounce of gentian scraped and sliced, a sixpenny worth of cochineal and a pint of brandy. Gentian was often used for flavouring various bitters and is said to assist with digestive issues. The cochineal was most likely used to dye the mixture. Worner’s Famous Rattlesnake Oil was said to cure rheumatism, paralysis, stiff joints, contracted cords and muscles, lumbago, pneumonia, neuralgia, deafness, asthma and catarrh. The claims made by Worner were clearly absurd and unfounded.
Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment boasted quite a few more remedies, including general pain and lameness, rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, contracted cords, toothache, strains, swellings, frost bites, chilblains, bruises, sore throat and even bites from animals, insects and reptiles! When the mixture was finally tested by the United States government in 1917, it was found to simply contain ingredients similar to a liniment or chest rub.
There became a need to regulate a great number of industries by the late nineteenth century, and one of those was the medicine trade. A good number of remedies may have had some slight means of medicinal assistance to them, but the reality is that a greater number were a complete sham and were sometimes more harmful than good. The regulation of drugs was so very dire not just because of the unregulated bitters, but due to the chemists offering what we still consider to be hard drugs today.
In Victorian Britain the attitude towards what we now consider to be illegal or subversive drugs was drastically different. The average chemist’s shop would offer a number of drugs, including opium and cocaine. The Industrial Revolution was a time of great change, but also a time of increased drug use, not only by the working classes, but also the artists and writers of the era. An opium or morphine addiction wasn’t as uncommon as it ought to have been.
It was near the latter half of the nineteenth century that a German chemist would create what he thought would be a cough remedy with pain relieving effects but without the addictive properties of morphine or codeine. It was through these noble intentions that one of the most terribly addictive drugs in the world today would be accidentally created.
The History of Bayer
The history of the company known as Bayer AG dates back to 1863, when the company was founded in Barmen, Germany. The first major mark that Bayer made on the world was when they copyrighted and sold aspirin, a product they are still known for today. The chemists at Bayer were hard at work developing their synthetically modified version of salicin, which they would eventually copyright as aspirin in 1897. Aspirin would enjoy a huge share of the marketplace, until two options with less side effects were introduced, acetaminophen in 1956 and ibuprofen in 1969.
There was controversy within Bayer early on, beginning with the true identity of the chemist who developed aspirin. The record books state that German Felix Hoffmann was responsible for the product, but those claims have been refuted by Arthur Eichengrun, a Jewish chemist who also worked for Bayer at the time. His claim is that once the company became entwined with the Nazi party during the Second World War, he was written out of the record books. The facts are that no documents prior to 1934 actually credit Hoffman with the invention. A company like Bayer, who had merged at the time with IG Farben, was very involved with the Nazi party in Germany, and therefore had every motivation to participate in an ‘Aryanisation’ of their history, especially when it comes to their most famous product. The idea that a Jewish chemist would be replaced in their records isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
Who created Heroin?
The creation of heroin was truly without any intended malice, even though the end result would come to be a blight on society that would be felt well over a century later. A chemist named C. R. Alder Wright was the first person responsible for synthesising diacetylmorphine, now commonly known as heroin back in 1874. The British chemist came upon the mixture while he was experimenting with combining morphine with various acids. His results were recorded, but nothing more came of it at the time. This wasn’t the point at which the world would be introduced to heroin.
The real introduction of the drug wouldn’t happen until twenty-three years later at a Bayer pharmaceuticals factory in Wuppertal, North-Western Germany. A Bayer chemist by the name of Felix Hoffmann, the same one that was credited with aspirin, was the man responsible for the drug. He was instructed by his supervisor, Heinrich Dreser, to produce a more effective substitute for codeine for the pharmaceutical company. There were issues with the addictive properties in codeine, so Bayer was looking for an all-new non-addictive alternative to introduce into the marketplace.
The result of Hoffman’s work would not, ironically, produce codeine, but rather a drug that is actually far less potent and more highly addictive than morphine, not to mention two and a half times more potent! The drug that would become known and marketed as heroin, was originally referred to as ‘Heroisch’, the German word for ‘Heroic’. The name was a reference to the elevated emotional state that Bayer discovered the drug induced in its user. The emergence of the formula by Hoffman would lead to Bayer pioneering the commercialisation of heroin around the world. The drug was marketed as a non-addictive medicinal alternative to morphine and codeine; a claim that we are now well aware was false.
The testing phase began immediately and was conducted mostly with rabbits and frogs, but soon moved to human trials. The drug was tested on various Bayer employees and even on Hoffman himself. The next stage involved Dreser presenting heroin to the Congress of German Naturalists and Phys
icians in November of 1898. Dreser touted the drug as a miracle cure for coughs that was ten times more effective than codeine, with ten times fewer side effects, and none of the habit-forming properties. Bayer trademarked its original ‘wonder drug’ in 1898 and would soon market it to families worldwide.
Dr Bernard Lazarus did his own analysis of heroin, which he published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, in 1900. In this he cited seven cases in which the use of heroin hydrochloride for the relief of coughs, especially in the case of tuberculosis, was an effective option. He goes on to state: ‘The very thorough investigations which I have made with heroin hydrochloride in my practice enable me impartially to state that I consider this drug a most valuable aid to the medical profession.’
Why Heroin? The Purpose and Cures
In our age of modern medical achievements we may ask ourselves why would any parent turn to a dangerous drug like heroin as a cough remedy for their children? The reputation of heroin is well established today, but back in the late nineteenth century it was a brand-new product, without the horrific reputation it carries today. Bayer was simply filling the need that was left in the marketplace to address the mortal fear of the dreaded cough. When a child came down with a cough in this pre-vaccination era it was a frightening situation for their parents. There was an intense, but very well founded, fear of a deadly disease striking, such as tuberculosis, pneumonia or pertussis (aka whooping cough). The death toll from tuberculosis in the United States alone back in 1900 was nearly 150,000 per annum. The prevalent thought process at the time was that the intense cough was the symptom that would lead to the disease. We now know that is not the case, but the desire to prevent and eliminate a cough once it surfaced, and to eliminate coughing fits while one was trying to rest, was one that companies were happy to try and satisfy through various remedies and products.
Heroin Marketed to Children
It was all the way back on 6 March 1899 when Bayer first patented aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) with the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin, but for decades now, the company has been promoting the medicine as a preventative for heart attacks and this has become a major selling point for aspirin products. It is common knowledge nowadays that taking a low-dose aspirin each day can prevent a heart attack or stroke. The blood-thinning medication can help to keep blood clots from forming.
Bayer has branded their aspirin with motivational, and telling, slogans such as ‘The More You Know, The More You Trust Bayer’, and ‘Take it for Pain, Take it for Life’. Their most recent, as of the writing of his book, was ‘Expect Wonders’. In fact, they continue to label their aspirin as a pro-heart ‘wonder drug’. Bayer has marketed their aspirin this way, but the reality of a Bayer aspirin regime is that it can reduce instances of a fatal heart attack by ten per cent and non-fatal heart attacks by twenty per cent, but it has been shown to increase gastrointestinal bleeding episodes in thirty per cent of users, according to a 2012 research study.
The marketing of their second major product, heroin-hydrochloride, persisted well into the twentieth century. A Bayer Pharmaceutical Products ad from 1901 markets the drug to pharmacies as a way to manufacture their own remedies like ‘cough elixirs, cough balsams, cough drops, cough lozenges and cough medicines of any kind’. Bayer would also use the slogan: ‘The Sedative For Coughs’, to describe their heroin product. Vintage Bayer adverts in Spanish newspapers around 1912 featured ads that clearly market the use of heroin or ‘heronia’ to children. The adverts feature headlines such as ‘la tos desaparece’, which translates to ‘cough disappears’, and feature doting mothers administering the ‘medicine’ to their offspring.
The bottles were offered in 1oz quantities at a cost of $4.85 per ounce. Allowing for inflation, the cost would be just over $139 per ounce today. Bayer didn’t limit their marketing of heroin as just a cough remedy however; they actually suggested it was a miracle cure-all that could be used for everything from schizophrenia to the common cold. Obviously, we know that none of these claims had any basis whatsoever, but snake oil marketing like this wasn’t uncommon for the era and certainly wasn’t limited to Bayer.
The thought of developing and marketing heroin to the public, much less children, seems particularly heinous. The question has to be asked, can we actually hold Bayer responsible? After all, we didn’t know that heroin was such a dangerous and addictive drug back in those days, right? Unfortunately, that is not necessarily the case. Concerns were raised about the addictiveness of the drug very early on – as early as the year after its release. Bayer was well aware of this concern, but continued to market heroin to children well into the twentieth century. It wasn’t until 1914 that the drug was finally restricted to a prescription-only medication by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. Heroin wouldn’t be fully banned from sale and importation until 1924. If heroin were the darkest skeleton in Bayer’s past it would be more than enough, but it is only the beginning of their twisted story.
Bayer and the Nazis
The creation and marketing of heroin to children could perhaps be enough to constitute a seriously dark past, but the skeletons in Bayer’s closet seem to go far deeper than that.
During the Second World War there was a pharmaceutical conglomerate named IG Farben. The IG is short for the German word Interessengemeinschaft, which translates to ‘Association of Common Interests’. IG Farben consisted of eight different companies, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, Chemische Fabrik Griesheim-Elektron, Chemische Fabrik vorm. Weiler Ter Meer, Cassella, Chemische Fabrik Kalle and Bayer. Bayer wasn’t just a part of the corporate machine, they were actually one of the major players in IG Farben with a 27.4 per cent equity capital investment. IG Farben employed hundreds of thousands of German citizens by the late 1930s and would become the single largest Germany exporter, enjoying a monopoly in the marketplace.
IG Farben decided to go into business with Adolf HItler and his Nazi Party early on and enjoyed a long relationship with the future dictator. In fact, IG Farben would donate significant amounts of money to the National Socialist Party to support their political election campaigns. Adolf Hitler was appointed the German chancellor on 30 January 1933, after a failed attempt at a presidential run in 1932. This new position of power served only to embolden the Nazi Party and they quickly set their sights on the upcoming German elections to be held on 5 March 1933. The Nazis were hoping to gain a majority vote in the Reichstag, so that they could pass the Enabling Act. The Act was a Weimar Constitutional amendment that would give Hitler the ability to enact laws on his own with the approval of the German Cabinet, effectively bypassing any approvals previously needed from the Reichstag. The Act, along with the preceding Reichstag Fire Decree, would pave the way for Hitler’s dictatorship and absolute power in Germany.
A secret meeting was held on 20 February 1933 between Hitler and over two dozen powerful industrialists at Hermann Goering’s home. The purpose behind the meeting was to persuade the big business moguls to invest in the Nazi Party election campaigns for the coming March. The donations came in from several companies, raising over two million Reichsmark, four hundred thousand of those Reichsmark coming from IG Farben alone. IG Farben was reportedly represented at the meeting by board member Georg von Schnitzler. Schnitzler later became a captain in the Nazi Sturmabteilung (aka the Brownshirts). In order to place that donation into context with inflation, that four hundred thousand Reichsmark would be the equivalent to around thirty million dollars (nearly twenty-four million pounds) today. The efforts were for nought, because the Nazis failed to obtain the majority they were seeking in that election. Instead, they rendered any Communist members of the Reichstag unable to vote and threatened any non-Nazi members with violence, winning the vote for the Enabling Act through intimidation.
It was only through the assistance of IG Farben that many of the medical and scientific horrors of the concentration camps were able to proceed. In 1940, IG Farben were looking to build a new factory and they set their sights on Himmler’s largest concentrati
on camp, built in Oswiecim, or Auschwitz, Poland. The site was scouted by Otto Ambros, who found it to be ideal. The plan was to utilise slave labour from the camp to construct their new plant. The result was the Farben Suschwitz plant. It was the financial involvement of IG Farben that took Auschwitz from an obscure backwater of the Nazi extermination plan and pushed it to the forefront, making it the site of one of the largest mass murders in history.
When touring the grim and sorrowful remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the museum guides will plainly tell you that IG Farben were behind the Nazis building the Birkenau camp. The camp began, not as an extermination camp like so many others, but as a slave labour camp for IG Farben Industries. Slave labour was an integral part of the Nazi regime, with many companies taking part in the dark practice. The Buna Industrial plant, known as IG Auschwitz, was located approximately 6km from the Auschwitz camp. Buna housed one hundred thousand Soviet prisoners of war and utilised them for slave labour.
The Polish farmers who had been living on the land where the Auchwitz complexes would be constructed were all kicked-off of the land, all of their property destroyed to make way for the death and labour camps in 1940 and 1941. The Nazis utilised some of the raw leftover materials after the farmers’ buildings were destroyed as part of the construction of the camps. It wasn’t until after the Wannsee Conference in 1942 that thousands of innocent Western European Jews were shipped to Birkenau to be slaughtered or enslaved. IG Farben built an industrial complex on the land near Auchwitz to produce their chemicals; thirty thousand slave labourers would die there. When the Adolf Hitler was gearing-up to invade Poland and Czechoslovakia, IG Farben was working closely with the Nazis to secure and seize desired chemical plants in those regions. The conditions within Auschwitz were deplorable. The clothing and living spaces would often become infected with lice or other vermin and when that happened, a deadly chemical fumigant known as Zyklon B was used to treat them and kill the infecting creatures. In fact, the Zyklon B chemical fumigant gas would end up being the method used to kill the Russians, Jews, Gypsies and other prisoners in the Nazi gas chambers. The Nazis were in search of a more economically efficient way to mass-murder their prisoners and it was Auschwitz deputy Karl Fritzsch who first thought up the idea of using the gas to kill humans in the camp. This gas was produced by Fritz Haber’s company, Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Schadlingsbekampfung). Degesch utilised the evil product under licence from IG Farben who, in turn, owned 42.2 per cent of the shares in Degesch. Experiements that IG Farben were involved in included the forced testing of drugs on prisoners – including what would become the first round of chemotherapy treatments. Nazi SS Major Dr med. Helmuth Vetter was an employee of IG Farben. Vetter was the notorious chief doctor at Auschwitz and was himself often responsible, along with the other doctors there, for selecting which Jews would face the gas chambers. The Nazi SS Dr Hoven would testify the following at the Nuremberg trials:
A Secret History of Brands Page 11
