What Is An Opiate? (A Chemical History of the US Heroin Epidemic) скачать в хорошем качестве

What Is An Opiate? (A Chemical History of the US Heroin Epidemic)

The US is currently in the middle of a heroin epidemic. Between 2001 and 2014, deaths from heroin overdoses increased 600%. When I hear the news talk about this problem sometimes they talk about prescription drugs, and sometimes they talk about the past 10 or 20 years and what got us here, but as a chemist I feel like I have an unique view on this problem, because when you’re learning chemistry you also learn about the history of chemistry, and the history of heroin and addiction to painkillers reaches a long way back, really as far as history goes. Thousands of years ago, we didn’t have painkillers, but we did have flowers. Poppies specifically, and ancient cultures discovered that the latex of these plants, which is this little sappy looking drop, could get you high and numb your pain. Ok so back to thousands of years ago: humans use the latex drop to make opium. And naturally, it’s a big deal. Opium is extremely popular for thousands of years and spreads to a ton of places in the world. In the early 1800s scientists go back to the poppy, and they’re able to use chemistry to isolate one of the three chemicals that gets you fucked up. They called it morphine, named after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus, because it made people go to sleep. Luckily at about that time there was another chemist trying to make a less powerful, less addictive morphine, and working with morphine he was able to add these two groups, they’re called acetyl groups, and he made a new drug. Well, instead of being less powerful, it was twice as powerful. Since it was so strong, and what they considered a hero, they named it heroin. By 1924, the US had made heroin illegal, and we had kind of semi learned our lessons about opiates being bad because they’re so addictive. We actually had a good run there, until 1996, when Oxycontin was released. Oxycontin is just the brand name of oxycodone, and it had a huge marketing campaign based on having lower abuse potential than other opiates even though there was no scientific evidence backing that conclusion. It only took 4 years, at the start of 2000, for widespread reports of OxyContin abuse to surface.