Poppy extracts led to brain receptors

Poppy extracts led to brain receptors - The first controversy is to know who discovered morphine. Jean-Francois Derosne, 23 in Paris, prepared a crude extract of opium (with alcohol and water), and obtained, after potassium carbonate precipitation, what he called “ sel de Derosne. ” Derosne’s alkaloidal fraction lacked narcotic properties and was probably largely made of narcotine (also known as noscapine), perhaps mixed with meconic acid. This work, has been presented at the Institute of France in 1804, but only published in 1814. 24 It describes the isolation of a compound, but did not report any animal or human experiment. A young German apothecary from Paderborn (Grmany), Friedrich Sertürner did, in fact, begin publishingon opium in 1805, 25 and claimed to have begun work before a paper on opium by Derosne had appeared in 1804.

Opium  led to brain receptors

Opium poppy red led to brain receptors

This claim has been interpreted to mean that Sertürner began work in 1803. However, Sertürner’s earlier work fi xated on acid constituents of opium. Thus, his 1806 paper 26 is mainly concerned with the constituent we now know as meconic acid. It was only in 1817 that he unequivocally reported the isolation of pure morphine. 27 He prepared it by extracting opium with hot water and precipitating morphine with ammonia. He obtained colorless crystals, poorly soluble in water, but soluble in acids and alcohol. He then established that the crystals carried the pharmacological activity of opium. The name “ morphine” has been coined later. The discovery was received by great perplexity: morphine had an alkaline reaction toward litmus paper. The scientific world was doubtful and Pierre Jean Robiquet performed new experiments in order to check Sertürner results. 

For thefirst time a substance extracted from a plant was not an acid!Gay-Lussac fi nally accepted the revolutionary idea that alkaline drugs could be found in plants. All alkaline substances isolated in plants would be given a name with the suffi x “ -ine ” (Wilhelm Meissner, 1818) in order to remind the basic reaction of all these drugs. Morphine gained wide medical use in the beginning of the 1860s during the American Civil War, but many injured soldiers returned from the war as morphine addicts, victims of the “ soldiers’ disease. ” In 1874, English researcher, C. R. Alder Wright (Saint Mary’s Hospital, London) fi rst synthesized (diacetylmorphine) by boiling morphine acetate over a stove. Twenty years later, Heinrich Dreser working for the Bayer Company of Elberfeld, Germany, found (erroneously) that diluting morphine with acetyls produced a drug without the common morphine side effects. In 1895, Bayer began the production of diacetylmorphine and coined the name “ heroin ” and introduced it, commercially, after another three years ( Figure 1.4 ).

At the beginning of the 20th century, heroin addiction rose to alarming rates driving United Kingdom, United States and France to ban opium and opiate drugs. During next 70 years, morphine will be almost completely withdrawn from medical use, before its “ rehabilitation” that came through the so-called Hospice movement , founded in the United Kingdom in order to alleviate suffering of dying patients within hospitals.