http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,,1852855,00.html
Truth about ecstacy's unlikely trip from lab to dance floor
Pharmaceutical company unravels drug's chequered past
David Adam
Friday August 18, 2006
Guardian
Sorted. More than two decades after the dance drug ecstasy burst on to
the scene, chemists have finally pieced together the true story of the
origins of one the most influential and controversial substances ever to
come from a test tube.
According to popular history the drug, first discovered in 1912, was
developed by the German pharmaceutical giant Merck as a lucrative way to
suppress the appetites of soldiers in the German army - a plot foiled by
reports of bizarre side effects among the first human guinea pigs. Merck,
the story goes, was forced to withdraw the compound and consigned it to
the pharmaceutical scrap heap, where it lay until resurrected by 1970s
drug guru Alexander Shulgin.
This version of events appears regularly in medical reports, newspaper
articles, textbooks and even on the official website of the US drug
enforcement administration. But Merck has decided to set the record
straight.
In an unusual step, the company got experts from its corporate history
department and a local doctor to trawl through thousands of original
documents in its archive at its headquarters in Darmstad.
For more than a year, they searched for references to ecstasy in
laboratory journals, annual reports, patents, letters, interview records,
memoirs and the other historical detritus thrown up by six decades of
scientific research from 1900 to 1960.
Their verdict? The company did develop the drug in 1912, but the appetite
suppressant story is an urban myth, passed on from source to source
through "uncritical copy-paste procedures". Instead, documents from the
time show that ecstasy emerged during the company's efforts to develop a
potentially life-saving medicine that would help blood to clot.
The best available blood clot medicine at the time, hydrastinin, was
patented by Merck's local rival Bayer. Merck chemists believed that a
similar compound called methylhydrastinin would be equally effective and
set about trying to make it from scratch in a way not covered by the
Bayer patent. Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, was first produced during
these experiments, but attracted little attention. Merck's recent search
found just a passing reference to the drug: in a patent the company filed
in 1912 to protect its new blood clot agent, which had been tested on
patients in a Berlin hospital. Patent 274350 did not refer to MDMA by
name, but described its properties among a list of other new
intermediates: "colourless oil, boiling point 155C at 20mm pressure, its
salt forms white crystals".
Tellingly, there were no references to any experiments to test the
biological effects of ecstasy, then known as methylsafrylamin. As the
official report of Merck's historical detectives puts it: "In clear
contrast to what is usually claimed by the 'ecstasy' literature, MDMA was
neither studied in animals nor humans at Merck around 1912."
This is not the first time that the appetite suppressant pill story has
been exposed as false - Dr Shulgin and others have published more
accurate accounts - but Merck hopes its rewriting of history will put the
myth to bed. The false story probably started, the company says, because
a US laboratory studied a similar compound called MDA as a possible diet
drug between 1949 and 1957.
No one from Merck's corporate history department would comment, but a
spokesman said the company had decided to act because it was regularly
asked about its role in ecstasy's development. Its report appears this
month in the journal Addiction.
What happened next? The Merck archive reveals that the company revived
its interest in ecstasy in 1927, when the first tests were carried out on
animals. The details have been lost, but it seems that a chemist called
Max Oberlin had stumbled on the original patent and thought MDMA might
mimic adrenaline because it had a similar structure.
Oberlin described the results of his tests as "partly remarkable" but the
research was halted because of steep rises in the price of chemicals
needed to make the drug. He recommended the company "keep an eye on this
field". Further Merck tests in 1952 showed that the compound was toxic to
flies. More controversial is the first testing on humans. The US air
force is known to have carried out secret tests of MDMA and other drugs
in the early 1950s. The experiments are often described as a search for a
truth serum, but were carried out on animals, and it is more likely the
military was searching for new chemical weapons.
The Merck archive suggests one of its scientists may have administered
the first human tests in 1959. Wolfgang Fruhstorfer, a company chemist,
was interested in the production of new stimulants and the report found
"insinuations" that he had cooperated with an institute for aviation
medicine. But it says: "Despite all efforts, it remains unclear whether
he also investigated MDMA effects in humans."
By now, others had picked up the baton and run with it. A year later, in
1960, the first official recipe for ecstasy appeared in a scientific
journal (in Polish) and by 1970 MDMA was cropping up in tablets seized in
Chicago.
Dr Shulgin, a former scientist with the chemical company Dow, says he was
told about the compound in the early 1970s. He synthesised the drug in
1976 and later tested it on himself - the first recorded human trials.
His enthusiasm for the effects brought the drug to mainstream attention,
for which he is often called the "godfather" of ecstasy. But the new
Merck report reveals the drug's true heritage.
Buried in the archive, the Merck team found the original laboratory
annual report for 1912, which describes the first synthesis, and names
the scientists involved. The true father of ecstasy, the Guardian can
reveal, was an anonymous German chemist called Anton Kollisch, who died
in 1916 with no idea of the impact his legacy would have.
Timeline
1912 First synthesis of MDMA by Kollishch at Merck in Darmstadt
1970 First detection of MDMA in tablets seized in the streets of Chicago.
By the mid-1970s the drugs expert Alexander Shulgin had begun to research
its effects
1977 MDMA classified as a Class A drug in UK
1984 MDMA's street name of 'ecstasy' coined in California
1985 MDMA becomes a Schedule 1 controlled substance in the US
In the UK the street price of ecstasy is £25
Mid to late 80s Raves become increasingly popular, spreading out from the
centres of London and Manchester
1989 Raves, and the electronic dance music and ecstasy, which fuels them,
lead to a 'second summer of love'. Acid house, with the accompanying
smiley-face T-shirts, goes mainstream and into the pop charts. This year
also sees the first recorded ecstasy-related death in the UK
1994 Parts of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act target raves, or
gatherings with music which is characterised by 'a succession of
repetitive beats'
1995 Death of Leah Betts after taking an ecstasy tablet on her 18th
birthday
2003 6,230 people found guilty, cautioned or fined for ecstasy related
offences
2005 In a survey of 500 Edinburgh students, 36% said they had taken
ecstasy and of those, 75% considered ecstasy a 'positive force' on their
lives
2006 The current street price is £3-8
Helen O'Brien
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Alamaine, IVe
Grand Forks, ND, US of A
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a
philosopher." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Don't ask about caste or riches but instead ask about conduct. Look
at the flames of a fire. Where do they come from? From a piece of
wood"and it doesn't matter what wood. In the same way, a wise
person can come from wood of any sort. It is through firmness and
restraint and a sense of truth that one becomes noble, not through
caste. -Sutta Nipata
~~~~~~~
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