CHAPTER XII
CLASSIFICATION OF HABIT-FORMING DRUGS
Opium is the basis of almost all the habit-forming drugs. There is no other drug known to the pharmacist that has a similar action or can be used as a substitute when a definite tolerance of it has been established. The chemists have given us more than twenty different salts or alkaloids of opium in various forms and under as many different trade names, and I regret to say that they are busy working in their laboratories to put upon the market injurious drugs under various supposedly harmless disguises, but intended in the end only to deceive.
MORPHINE
Morphine is the active principle of opium, and until a few years ago only crude opium or morphine was used for medical requirements. Morphine is intrinsically far worse than opium itself, for opium has certain properties which partly counteract the effect of the morphine that it contains. But morphine is not only the active principle, but the actively evil principle, of the drug.
The user of morphine always retains his faculties. He is usually capable of intelligent conversation. Unlike the alcoholic’s brain, his is not inflamed. It is impossible for the physician intelligently to discuss his symptoms with an alcoholic; with a victim of drugs, on the other hand, he can thresh out every detail of the case.
Later codeine was placed upon the market, supposedly an innocent alkaloid of opium, non-habit-forming, but still capable of eliminating pain and suffering due to illness or injury. After taking up this work, my investigations soon led me to realize that it was not the quantity of the drug taken which produced the drug habit, but the regularity of the dosage. I also found from my clinical comparisons that codeine has only one eighth the strength of morphine, yet in the end just as surely a producer of the drug habit similar to that of morphine itself.
HEROIN