Chapter Six
Bayer: Heroin and Genocide
The history of Bayer is one that can only be described as complex and troubled. We’ve all heard of heroin, one of the most dangerous and addictive drugs in the world. The very mention of heroin can inspire images of underweight junkies, needles, and arms covered in track marks. The reality of heroin is that it causes an immense amount of suffering for the users and their loved ones. What you may not think about when you picture heroin is a bottle of the drug on a store shelf. Imagine heroin bottled by Bayer, the makers of aspirin, and marketed as a cough remedy for children. This was the reality a little over a century ago. Then, imagine for a moment that the creation and introduction of heroin was only a drop in the bucket, as the same company would be a co-sponsor of the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.
The origins of opium date as far back as 3400 BCE in the ancient region of Mesopotamia. The opium poppy was also found referenced in ancient texts from Egyptian, Sanskrit, Greek, Minoan and Sumerian cultures. The Sumerians would refer to it as the aptly named ‘hul gil’, which means ‘plant of joy’. During the nineteenth century, when the Wild West of America was being settled and the railroad was under construction, a lot of immigrant workers were imported from China. These Chinese labourers brought with them opium, a substance that would catch on like wildfire. The images we see projected on film of a cowboy at the saloon drinking whiskey may have been a common sight in the movies and on television, but it was perhaps even more common in real life to find legendary characters like Wild Bill Hickock in a dimly lit opium den, high out of his mind.
The next stage in the story of opium was morphine. Originally named morphium, for the Greek god Morpheus (the god of dreams), the alkaloid that would become morphine was first isolated from the opium poppy by pharmacist’s apprentice Friedrich Sertürner sometime between 1803 and 1805. It was the very first time any alkaloid had been isolated from a plant. Morphine was later introduced to the marketplace for consumption by Merck in 1827. It was the shortcomings in morphine that would lead to the creation of heroin.
You’ve no doubt heard the term ‘snake oil’ or ‘snake oil salesman’, at least in passing. While it’s a cliché for a hoax nowadays, these elixirs were a very real and commonly used cure-all remedy throughout the 1700s and 1800s. The Victorian era was rife with quack medicine that made all sorts of claims, none of which needed to be proved by any government regulation until 1858 in the United Kingdom, and after the turn of the twentieth century in the United States.
When we think about snake oil today, what often comes to mind is a placebo or a hoax medicine that doesn’t actually work. That wasn’t necessarily always the case. While we didn’t have a lot of the established medicines in the nineteenth century that we have now, many of the remedies that were used did have a medical basis. Bayer would initially market their heroin product like snake oil, which will be explored later in this chapter.
A few of the more famous, or rather infamous, snake oils were ‘Richard Stoughton’s elixir’, ‘Worner’s Famous Rattlesnake Oil’ and ‘Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil’. Richard Stoughton’s elixir was one of the first bitters to receive a patent in England, back in 1712. The ingredients are said to have included the rinds of oranges, an ounce of gentian scraped and sliced, a sixpenny worth of cochineal and a pint of brandy. Gentian was often used for flavouring various bitters and is said to assist with digestive issues. The cochineal was most likely used to dye the mixture. Worner’s Famous Rattlesnake Oil was said to cure rheumatism, paralysis, stiff joints, contracted cords and muscles, lumbago, pneumonia, neuralgia, deafness, asthma and catarrh. The claims made by Worner were clearly absurd and unfounded.
Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment boasted quite a few more remedies, including general pain and lameness, rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, contracted cords, toothache, strains, swellings, frost bites, chilblains, bruises, sore throat and even bites from animals, insects and reptiles! When the mixture was finally tested by the United States government in 1917, it was found to simply contain ingredients similar to a liniment or chest rub.
There became a need to regulate a great number of industries by the late nineteenth century, and one of those was the medicine trade. A good number of remedies may have had some slight means of medicinal assistance to them, but the reality is that a greater number were a complete sham and were sometimes more harmful than good. The regulation of drugs was so very dire not just because of the unregulated bitters, but due to the chemists offering what we still consider to be hard drugs today.
In Victorian Britain the attitude towards what we now consider to be illegal or subversive drugs was drastically different. The average chemist’s shop would offer a number of drugs, including opium and cocaine. The Industrial Revolution was a time of great change, but also a time of increased drug use, not only by the working classes, but also the artists and writers of the era. An opium or morphine addiction wasn’t as uncommon as it ought to have been.
It was near the latter half of the nineteenth century that a German chemist would create what he thought would be a cough remedy with pain relieving effects but without the addictive properties of morphine or codeine. It was through these noble intentions that one of the most terribly addictive drugs in the world today would be accidentally created.
The history of the company known as Bayer AG dates back to 1863, when the company was founded in Barmen, Germany. The first major mark that Bayer made on the world was when they copyrighted and sold aspirin, a product they are still known for today. The chemists at Bayer were hard at work developing their synthetically modified version of salicin, which they would eventually copyright as aspirin in 1897. Aspirin would enjoy a huge share of the marketplace, until two options with less side effects were introduced, acetaminophen in 1956 and ibuprofen in 1969.
There was controversy within Bayer early on, beginning with the true identity of the chemist who developed aspirin. The record books state that German Felix Hoffmann was responsible for the product, but those claims have been refuted by Arthur Eichengrun, a Jewish chemist who also worked for Bayer at the time. His claim is that once the company became entwined with the Nazi party during the Second World War, he was written out of the record books. The facts are that no documents prior to 1934 actually credit Hoffman with the invention. A company like Bayer, who had merged at the time with IG Farben, was very involved with the Nazi party in Germany, and therefore had every motivation to participate in an ‘Aryanisation’ of their history, especially when it comes to their most famous product. The idea that a Jewish chemist would be replaced in their records isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
The creation of heroin was truly without any intended malice, even though the end result would come to be a blight on society that would be felt well over a century later. A chemist named C. R. Alder Wright was the first person responsible for synthesising diacetylmorphine, now commonly known as heroin back in 1874. The British chemist came upon the mixture while he was experimenting with combining morphine with various acids. His results were recorded, but nothing more came of it at the time. This wasn’t the point at which the world would be introduced to heroin.