This is generally believed to be the first isolation of an active ingredient from a plant. Merck began marketing it commercially in 1827. Morphine was more widely used after the invention of the hypodermic syringe in 1853–1855. Sertürner originally named the substance morphium, after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus, as it has a tendency to cause sleep.The primary source of morphine is isolation from poppy straw of the opium poppy. In 2013, approximately 523 tons of morphine were produced. Approximately 45 tons were used directly for pain, an increase of 400% over the last twenty years. Most use for this purpose was in the developed world. About 70 percent of morphine is used to make other opioids such as hydromorphone, oxymorphone, and heroin. It is a Schedule II drug in the United States, Class A in the United Kingdom, and Schedule I in Canada. It is on the World Health Organizations List of Essential Medicines. Morphine is sold under many trade names. In 2019, it was the 163rd most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 3 million prescriptions. Medical uses
Pain
Morphine is used primarily to treat both acute and chronic severe pain. Its duration of analgesia is about three to seven hours. Side-effects of nausea and constipation are rarely severe enough to warrant stopping treatment. It is used for pain due to myocardial infarction and for labor pains. However, concerns exist that morphine may increase mortality in the event of non ST elevation myocardial infarction.
In the 1850s, Alexander Wood reported that he had injected morphine into his wife Rebecca as an experiment; the myth goes that this killed her because of respiratory depression, but she outlived her husband by ten years.Later it was found that morphine was more addictive than either alcohol or opium, and its extensive use during the American Civil War allegedly resulted in over 400,000 people with the "soldiers disease" of morphine addiction. This idea has been a subject of controversy, as there have been suggestions that such a disease was in fact a fabrication; the first documented use of the phrase "soldiers disease" was in 1915.Diacetylmorphine (better known as heroin) was synthesized from morphine in 1874 and brought to market by Bayer in 1898. Heroin is approximately 1.5 to 2 times more potent than morphine weight for weight. Due to the lipid solubility of diacetylmorphine, it can cross the blood–brain barrier faster than morphine, subsequently increasing the reinforcing component of addiction. Using a variety of subjective and objective measures, one study estimated the relative potency of heroin to morphine administered intravenously to post-addicts to be 1.80–2.66 mg of morphine sulfate to 1 mg of diamorphine hydrochloride (heroin). Morphine became a controlled substance in the US under the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, and possession without a prescription in the US is a criminal offense. Morphine was the most commonly abused narcotic analgesic in the world until heroin was synthesized and came into use.