Something New at the Apothecary Shop:
Refined Natural Drugs

Young men smoking opium in the Philippines in the early 1900s.

In Asia, dried poppy juice, also known as opium, has been used as a pain reliever for centuries. Opium is a mixture of a number of compounds. In the early 1800s scientists got the idea of separating out these different compounds, finding out which ones were good painkillers and using the refined compounds instead of raw opium for treating pain. Two compounds were found in opium that are still used as painkillers today: morphine and codeine.

Bottles of the malaria drug quinine.

A lot of medicinal plants could be refined to give powerful drugs it turned out. But people sometimes needed so much medicine that no one could grow enough plants to meet the need. So scientists had to learn how to make natural drugs synthetically. That may sound like a contradiction, but it really isn't. What scientists were trying to do was to put atoms together to make molecules that were identical to the molecules that plants produced, the molecules that relieved pain. It doesn't matter if the molecule was made by a plant or in a laboratory. If the molecules have the same atoms arranged in exactly the same manner, they will both behave exactly the same in the body. The properties of a molecule are determined by its molecular structure, not by how it was made.

This leads us back to aspirin. Before aspirin, salicylic acid was used as a pain reliever. Salicylic acid was obtained from willow trees, but since not enough willow trees could be grown to make enough salicylic acid for all the people who needed it, scientists had to learn to make it from coal tar or petroleum. In this way, a lot of natural drugs became "synthetic" drugs.