40 Fun Facts About Morphine

Eating which bagel topping, harvested from the plant that yields morphine, can cause a failed drug test?

Poppy seeds can carry traces of opium from the pod, enough to register as opiates in a urine test. US federal testing raised its cut-off level in 1998 partly to stop bagels failing people.

Morphine's discoverer named the drug after Morpheus, the Greek god of what?

Dreams were the realm of Morpheus, who in Ovid's Metamorphoses enters them in the shape of mortal men. The drug was first called morphium before the modern spelling took over.

Which drug did Bayer sell from 1898 as a cough remedy and supposedly safer substitute for morphine?

Heroin is morphine with two acetyl groups added, and its trade name is said to come from the German word for heroic. An English chemist had first made it in 1874.

Which fictional Victorian detective sometimes uses morphine and injects cocaine in a seven-percent solution?

Sherlock Holmes reaches for both drugs mostly when he has no stimulating case to work on, to Dr Watson's dismay. Both were legal in 19th-century England.

Which natural painkillers made in the brain have a name that is short for 'endogenous morphine'?

Endorphins are peptides that block the perception of pain and lift the mood, and the brain releases them during hard exercise. Endogenous simply means made within.

Which emergency drug, sold as the nasal spray Narcan, can reverse a morphine overdose within minutes?

Naloxone blocks the receptors that opioids act on, and it works within about two minutes when given into a vein. It wears off faster than some opioids, so repeat doses may be needed.

Which Nazi leader became addicted to morphine after being wounded in Hitler's failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch?

Hermann Göring was given the drug after surgery in Innsbruck, and the habit lasted until his imprisonment at Nuremberg. In 1925 he was placed in an asylum as a dangerous addict.

Which synthetic opioid, often worn as a skin patch, is rated 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine?

Fentanyl was first made by Paul Janssen in 1960 and approved for US medical use in 1968. Morphine remains the yardstick against which the strength of such drugs is measured.

Heavy use of morphine in which war is said to have left veterans with the so-called 'soldier's disease'?

American Civil War use of the drug was extensive, but historians dispute how many veterans it hooked. The phrase 'soldier's disease' is first documented only in 1915.

Which milder painkiller, also found in raw opium, works largely by turning into morphine once swallowed?

Codeine is a prodrug, turned into morphine by an enzyme called CYP2D6. People with extra working copies of the gene convert it so fast that normal doses can be dangerous.

Which common side effect of morphine comes from the drug's action on nerves in the wall of the intestine?

Constipation follows because the drug slows the muscle contractions that push food through the gut. The anti-diarrhoea remedy loperamide works by the very same action.

Which change in the eyes is one of the three classic signs doctors look for in a morphine overdose?

Pinpoint pupils, known medically as miosis, are caused by nearly every opioid, with pethidine a notable exception. Withdrawal does the opposite and widens them.

A large overdose of morphine kills mainly by shutting down which vital function?

Breathing turns slow and shallow until the blood runs short of oxygen, a state doctors call respiratory depression. Immediate medical attention can prevent death.

Which bitter, reddish-brown tincture of opium in alcohol was a common Victorian remedy containing morphine?

Laudanum holds about 10% powdered opium by weight, the equivalent of roughly 1% morphine. Doctors can still prescribe it as opium tincture, mainly for stubborn diarrhoea.

Morphine use spread widely after which 1850s invention credited to the Scottish doctor Alexander Wood?

Hypodermic syringe injections put the drug straight under the skin rather than through the gut. Wood's 1853 design joined a hollow needle to a true syringe.

Which organ breaks down much of a swallowed dose of morphine before it can reach the rest of the body?

Liver enzymes intercept the drug on its way from the gut, an effect called first-pass metabolism. About 87% of a dose then leaves in the urine within three days.

Morphine is on which organisation's List of Essential Medicines, a guide to the drugs countries need most?

World Health Organization experts rate it an essential painkiller, yet most medical use of the drug still happens in the developed world.

Which Hungarian-born horror star became addicted to morphine prescribed for sciatic pain?

Bela Lugosi, the screen's 1931 Dracula, sought treatment in 1955, and the premiere of one of his last films was arranged to help pay his hospital bills.

What is the medical term for needing ever larger doses of morphine to get the same relief after repeated use?

Tolerance builds faster for pain relief than for some of the drug's dangers, so chasing the same relief with bigger doses raises the risk of an overdose.

Which German pharmacist, then in his early twenties, first isolated morphine from opium in Paderborn?

Friedrich Sertürner publicly warned of the terrible effects of the substance he had found. His work is regarded as the first isolation of a medicinal plant's active drug.

Morphine's discoverer reported in 1817 that he had nearly died after dosing himself and which other people?

Three young boys swallowed the drug alongside him, and all four people almost died. He then had the group drink vinegar to purge the dose.

French doctor Edme Castaing is thought to be the first person, in the 1820s, to use morphine for which crime?

Murder was the jury's verdict, by seven votes to five, over the death of his wealthy friend Auguste Ballet. Doctors at the trial disagreed about which poison had been used.

Vets give apomorphine, a compound first made by boiling morphine in acid, to make dogs do what?

Vomit is the aim when a dog has just swallowed something toxic or foreign. Despite the name, the drug contains no morphine and does not act on opioid receptors.

Which Australian state grows roughly half the world's legal supply of the plant that morphine comes from?

Tasmania's growers harvest the dried pods and stalks, known as straw, and factories pull the drug out with solvents. No sticky raw opium is collected there.

Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a morphine remedy first sold in 1845, was aimed mainly at which childhood ordeal?

Teething infants were quieted with a formula holding 65 mg of morphine per fluid ounce. In 1911 the American Medical Association listed it in a section called Baby Killers.

What were the single-dose squeeze-tube morphine injectors in World War II first aid kits called?

Syrette was the name of a sealed tube with a needle attached, developed by the drug maker Squibb just before the war. A wire loop broke the seal before the needle went in.

Where did World War II medics often pin a used morphine tube to show others a dose had been given?

On the collar was the usual spot, where the next medic or surgeon would see how much the wounded soldier had already received.

Which Asian country still gathers legal opium for morphine mainly by the old method of scoring the pods?

India licenses farmers to gather the raw latex, which government centres dry to a uniform level and sell to drug makers. Most other legal producers process the dried plant instead.

Scientists confirmed in the early 2000s that traces of morphine are made naturally in which unexpected place?

The human body makes tiny amounts of the drug itself, a finding that ended some thirty years of speculation about a receptor that seemed to respond only to morphine.

Papaver somniferum, the plant that morphine comes from, has a Latin species name with which meaning?

Sleep-bringing is the sense Carl Linnaeus chose when he named the species in 1753. The same Latin root, somnus, gives English the words insomnia and somnolent.

Which German company, grown from a Darmstadt pharmacy, began commercial production of morphine in 1827?

Merck built much of its early growth on sales of the painkiller, and for a time it also held a virtual monopoly on cocaine. The family firm traces its start to 1668.

Under the US Controlled Substances Act, morphine shares which legal category with cocaine and oxycodone?

Schedule II covers drugs that have an accepted medical use but a high potential for abuse. Schedule I is kept for drugs judged to have no accepted medical use at all.

Morphine works mainly by switching on which opioid receptor, named with a Greek letter in the drug's honour?

Mu stands for the M of morphine, the first compound shown to bind to it. The same receptor drives the drug's euphoria and physical dependence.

Morphine is seen as the first isolated example of which class of plant compounds, like caffeine and nicotine?

Alkaloids are natural compounds containing at least one nitrogen atom, and many act strongly on people: quinine and cocaine belong to the class too.

Which early 1900s childbirth method mixed morphine with scopolamine so mothers remembered little of labour?

Twilight sleep, a translation of the German Dämmerschlaf, eased the pain only partly but blotted out the memory of it. It became a fad in New York City between 1914 and 1916.

Which American playwright put his mother's morphine addiction on stage in an autobiographical family drama?

Eugene O'Neill's mother was first prescribed the drug after his own difficult birth. Long Day's Journey into Night appeared only after his death and won a 1957 Pulitzer Prize.

Which US federal law, signed by Woodrow Wilson in 1914, made morphine a controlled substance?

The Harrison Narcotics Act, proposed by New York congressman Francis Burton Harrison, regulated and taxed the production, import and distribution of opiates and coca products.

Which London hospital gave its name to a 'cocktail' of morphine, cocaine and alcohol once given to the dying?

Royal Brompton Hospital standardised the recipe in the late 1920s for cancer patients, adding syrup to mask the bitter taste. The mixture is now considered obsolete.

Which British chemist, awarded a Nobel Prize in 1947, worked out the molecular structure of morphine in 1925?

Robert Robinson's formula was confirmed in 1952, when the drug was first built from scratch in a laboratory.

Which Johns Hopkins surgeon became hooked on morphine when it was used to treat his cocaine addiction?

William Halsted stayed dependent on the drug for the rest of his life, yet many of the innovations he introduced remain standard operating room procedures.