Morphine Substitutes

The efforts of the League of Nations to reduce the sale and use of narcotics throughout the world is one of the rare activities of the League in which the U. S. takes a willing, effective part. Last week when the League of Nations' Opium Advisory Committee met in Geneva to deplore the state of narcotic affairs, Stuart Jamieson Fuller, U. S. spokesman, rose with special pride to report about the thoroughgoing efforts U. S. citizens are making to discover some drug which deadens pain as effectively as does morphine but creates no morphine-like habit.

This inventive work goes on at the Uni-versity of Virginia, under direction of Professor Lyndon Frederick Small, organic chemist. By last week he had produced more than 200 variations of morphine and sent them to his research-partner at the University of Michigan, Professor Nathan Browne Eddy, pharmacologist. Dr. Eddy tries the substitute drugs on rats, dogs and monkeys. He has found that several morphine substitutes invented by Dr. Small and others are better than morphine because they cause less vomiting and constipation, depress respiration less than does morphine. But "whether any of the substances possess addicting properties is very difficult to determine on animals, although efforts are being made to study this aspect of the problem on dogs and monkeys. However, the final test will have to be made on the human patient, and here [we have] the invaluable assistance of the U. S. Public Health Service."

Federal experiments take place gingerly on Public Health Service's Narcotics Farm, opened last year at Lexington, Ky. Only carefully selected patients, upon whom no harm is apt to fall, received morphine substitutes. The regular procedure is to give such an addict the new drug while he is deprived of morphine. If he throws no deprivation fits, the new drug is considered an effective narcotic. After several days of this, the patient is deprived of all drugs. If he throws a fit, this proves that the substitute is also habit-forming.

Up to last week this triangular experimenting produced no morphine substitute which the experimenters would certify as non-habit-forming. On the other hand, the work enabled Mr. Fuller to tell the world from Geneva last week that one substitute, desomorphine, for which much had been claimed, has "habit-forming properties even in excess of morphine or heroin."

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