April 17, 200521 yr http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_me...sp?story=630162 ... What Hoffman did was synthesise acetylsalicylic acid in a pure and stable form for the first time. His boss, Dreser, was not impressed. "Not good for the stomach," he said, and put his faith instead in another drug the company was developing. This was diacetylmorphine, and after the workers upon whom it had been tested declared it made them feel "heroic", he registered it under the trademark Heroin - and you would need a fix of the stuff to believe what came next. Heroin was marketed by Bayer as a cough soother, especially for babies, and it was only between 1904 and 1907 that serious doubts about it were raised. By then, many morphine devotees had switched their allegiance, the less well off among them funding their habit by selling scrap metal, hence "junkies". It was not until two decades later that the substance was made illegal. ...
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