Understanding Heroin

What is 'heroin'?

Heroin is a kind of concentration of what's active in the opium plant. The opium plant is very old, and has been known by humankind, but we've tried to find the active principle, the active substance in these old herbs, and that has been done in several steps. The first of them was finding out morphine was in opium, so you could sort of take that out of the old herb, and later on, heroin was found out to be a kind of reframing it chemically. But it's morphine, the chemical name of it is diacetylmorphine, and it's basically made into morphine once you put it in your body.

How is heroin made?

Heroin was made in one of the big pharmaceutical companies, actually the same one that made aspirin. Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Germany. They were looking for a good pain killer; they were looking for a cough depressant, and they thought they found it, the perfect one in 1898, and marketed it with the brand name "Heroin". They thought that would sell a lot and it did.

Where are heroin opium poppies grown?

Poppies have been grown all throughout Asia and southern Europe for millenniums, but the production of Morphine, and later, of Heroin, was mainly a European thing. It was only after it was made illegal that it came to be a Third World export to the industrialized world. It's made in small laboratories, and is quite simple to make.

What was the original purpose for heroin production?

The original purpose for making Heroin was to find a better painkiller than what humankind already had, and the best was Morphine. Second best was Opium. Morphine was made out of Opium, and Heroin is made out of Morphine.

How did heroin become famous?

Heroin became famous in several rounds, one would say. The first round was when it was first introduced on the market. Heroin was a brand name and it sold well. It was an over-the-counter medicine sold for pain killing and also for killing coughs.The second round of fame came as it was an illegal drug that was being used for self medication I'd say basically by people who had some sort of big hurt in their lives and have taken to this even though it was illegal. The upsurge of that second round of fame was primarily in the 50's, 60's and 70's and has stayed with us ever since.

How is heroin used?

Heroin can in principle be administered like all other drugs in a variety of ways, you can have it in a pill form, you can drink it, you can eat, you can have skin patches, you can inhale it, you can snort it up, and you can inject it. That's the same with most other drugs. The image that most people have regarding heroin nowadays is the injection because its repulsive to so many people, but injecting heroin is not the only way of having that drug into your body. It's also quite common in some countries to smoke it, for instance its called “chasing the dragon” you can put it on a piece of silver foil and heat the foil up and inhale the vapors. So I mean, there is no single way to put it into your body