Have an archive all of G-grandfather’s books, State records from well before 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which required labeling of products with cocaine, morphine, opium, and cannabis. Fascinating reading.
C. Alder Wright, English chemistry and physics researcher at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London, was the first person to synthesize diamorphine, in the UK in 1874. He was looking for a non-addictive form of morphine. He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride on a stove and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine, now called diamorphine, even more addictive unfortunately.
23 years later in 1897, Felix Hoffman, the inventor of aspirin at Bayer Fabrikin in Elberfeld, Germany- synthesized diamorphine while trying to make codeine from morphine under orders from Heinrich Dreser chief scientist. Bayer in the era of TB epidemic and pneumonia had a wonder drug, and they branded and trademarked it “Heroin” with patents for it’s processing in Europe and US, and marketed it starting in 1898 in 23 countries (also selling the compound whole to multiple small outfits who put it in a lot of other elixirs). In Spanish speaking countries it was marketed for adults and children for cough. US marketing was to adults as alternative to morphine (for “cough”,and more as a hopeful replacement for addictive morphine, there being large numbers of morphine addicts by then). The 1906 Pure Food and Drug act created the beginnings of a future FDA, requring labeling for products with opiates. Foreign product versions, without labeling other than brand, drew the attention of officials to the fact the product was in fact derived from morphine, resulted in 1913 with Bayer withdrawing the product. A federal ban on opiates followed in the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, and tightened with complete ban on heroin for any purpose in 1924. Hope that helps.
In re: the concentration camp reference—Bayer had their legacy tarnished during WWII when (having in 1925 been merged into the I.G.Farben German chemical company conglomerate) it was known to have used slave labor during WWII, including managing slave labor/concentration death camps. Farben was also the group that manufactured Zyklon B, the cyanide based pesticide used in the Nazi gas chambers. Bayer was forced to separate from Farben after WWII, and Fritz ter Meer, chairman of Bayer’s supervisory board, was tried and convicted during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal and sentenced to seven years in prison. He was involved in various experiments done at Auschwitz on human subjects, and mass murder.