How did Gordon Alles introduce amphetamines to the world?
He first presented the results, I think at the end of 1929 with Panes at a local AMA meeting on the west coast. And just said it had certain ephedrine like effects. It could be used as a decongestant and nose drops but also had central stimulating effects. And he later learned that there was an observer in the audience from a major drug company. Anyway, he started trying to find better drugs than the amphetamines he used as an asthma remedy. He patented, he filed a patent and received a patent on the drug in 1932. And right around the time that he knew he was going to get the patent he was going to be granted, he started contacting big drug companies to find out if anyone wanted to buy his invention, to buy rights to it. Right around the time that he approached these drug companies, a product came out on the market from the drug firm Smith Kline & French that was basically a version of his invention. It was amphetamine. It wasn't the amphetamine salts that you could take as a pill, which is what Alles had patented. Because that was always his goal, a pill, because it's preferred by patients to take a pill. It was pure amphetamine base, 325 milligrams of it and very little else sealed in a metal tube that was perforated at one end, and it was a decongestant inhaler. You're supposed to take the cap off the tube and stick it in your nose and breathe the volatile amphetamine which, like adrenaline, shrinks down swollen nasal tissue. So this amphetamine inhaler was released on the market by this drug company. And this is the same drug company that, he believed anyway, had an observer at his talk in 1929. So he came to feel that they had gotten the idea from him. Anyway, a lot of negotiations. And in 1934, they agreed on a deal where Smith Kline and French would take on the rights for amphetamine salts and start overseeing its development as a medicine.
