From 1898 - A safe and non-addictive substitute for morphine
As marketed by Bayer. I had forgotten about this -- heard it about ten years ago but it slipped my mind until Michael King at
Ramblings' Journal wrote about it.
From Mike:
1898: Bayer mass markets heroin as cough suppressant
Stranger and stranger these things might be.
Bayer trademarked "heroin" in 1898 as a non-addictive substitute for morphine, and marketed it alongside it's other trademarked product, "aspirin," as a remedy to be used in the home by consumers. Heroin was actually accepted as a safe remedy for children as a cough suppressant.
Bayer quit making heroin (as you can imagine, in a very pure form for public consumption) in 1910, after they determined the addictive properties of the narcotic were more than they had originally determined.
The US government outlawed the production of heroin in 1924.
Here are a couple of pictures:
Searching
Google for Bayer Heroin turns up 35,000 hits.
I read a 1993 book called
The Aspirin Wars which chronicled Bayer's loss of the Aspirin Monopoly during the two World Wars.
One of the things they tried to do was to promote Aspirin as a real medicine and not a "patent" medicine -- they went to great lengths to distance themselves from these. Funny to see that they were doing the very same thing by selling a powerful opiate as a non-addictive alternative to Morphene... All the same poppy juice...
Posted by DaveH at February 22, 2005 10:10 PM