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Aspirin Intrigue

What is the difference between fake aspirin and real aspirin? If they are chemically

the same, that is, acetylsalicylic acid (ASA), then what is the fuss? Are they both

indeed ASA? A bit of manufacturing history may clear up this question.

Bayer Company, the German chemical giant, had the great

good fortune to get out of the dye-making business and into

the pharmaceuticals business very early. Bayer called its

first pharmaceutical product, created wholecloth from waste

products, acetophenetidin. Hoping to promote this pain

reliever under its brand name rather than its chemical or

generic name, its creators called this new drug Phenacetin.

This new pharmaceutical marked the beginning of the

modern drug industryfor the first time, a drug had been

conceived, developed, tested, and marketed by a privatecompany. Bayer looked forward to enormous profits from

this and future drug products it might create.

Bayer's next addition to the Pharmacopoeia

was, of all things, heroin! Ironically, heroin

was synthesized by none other than Felix

Hoffmann. Doctors in the late 1800s were

very worried about their patients' growing

addiction to the painkiller morphine. Bayer

rediscovered a morphine derivative,

diacetylmorphine, that made their guinea-pig workers feel "heroic" and began to

market this "nonaddictive" substitute for

morphine under the brand name "heroin." Doctors even prescribed heroin to cure

babies' colic!

Meanwhile, ASA languished on Bayer's shelves. In ancient times, as you know from

reading other parts of this Web site, it had been discovered that the salicylic acid

(SA) from white willow bark had analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties. SA

was pretty hard on the digestive system, however, so a more gentle form was sought.

Back in 1853 a French chemist named Charles F. Gerhardt had synthesized crude

ASA, the milder form, and Karl J. Kraut, a German, succeeded in synthesizing apurer form sixteen years later. So Bayer, in the person of Felix Hoffmann, was a

Johnny-come-lately to the scene when, in 1897, he described his own success in

producing ASA. Although Hoffmann, and his boss,Arthur Eichengrn, knew of the

earlier syntheses of ASA, this did not deter them from passing it on to their boss,

Heinrich Dreser, who was singularly unimpressed. He rejected ASA out of hand

under the mistaken notion, gleaned mostly from hearsay, that ASA made the heart

weaker. How ironic that almost a century later, in 1988, a study in theJournal of

phenacetin

http://polysolve.com/index.php/1010110A/80dbb2b581061465e53d471e0b1a1b09e90c95b24df099f992430c539710b8d0798d8b88eb3d94d71003d15b2e9867af864d730ccdfa32026139324ce34415218http://polysolve.com/index.php/1010110A/80dbb2b581061465e53d471e0b1a1b09e90c95b24df099f992430c539710b8d0798d8b88eb3d94d71003d15b2e9867af864d730ccdfa32026139324ce34415218http://polysolve.com/index.php/1010110A/80dbb2b581061465e53d471e0b1a1b09e90c95b24df099f992430c539710b8d0798d8b88eb3d94d71003d15b2e9867af864d730ccdfa320266226c12a70733a5e515218http://polysolve.com/index.php/1010110A/80dbb2b581061465e53d471e0b1a1b09e90c95b24df099f992430c539710b8d0798d8b88eb3d94d71003d15b2e9867af864d730ccdfa320266226c12a70733a5e515218http://polysolve.com/index.php/1010110A/80dbb2b581061465e53d471e0b1a1b09e90c95b24df099f992430c539710b8d0798d8b88eb3d94d71003d15b2e9867af864d730ccdfa320266226c12a70733a5e515218http://polysolve.com/index.php/1010110A/80dbb2b581061465e53d471e0b1a1b09e90c95b24df099f992430c539710b8d0798d8b88eb3d94d71003d15b2e9867af864d730ccdfa320266226c12a70733a5e515218http://polysolve.com/index.php/1010110A/80dbb2b581061465e53d471e0b1a1b09e90c95b24df099f992430c539710b8d0798d8b88eb3d94d71003d15b2e9867af864d730ccdfa32026139324ce34415218http://polysolve.com/index.php/1010110A/80dbb2b581061465e53d471e0b1a1b09e90c95b24df099f992430c539710b8d0798d8b88eb3d94d71003d15b2e9867af864d730ccdfa32026139324ce34415218

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the American Medical Association would pronounce ASA a marvelous heart-attack

preventive.

Due to Eichengrn's persistence, Dreser finally agreed to pharmacological testing of

ASA, and after the glowing reports rolled in, he took credit for the discovery

himself, failing to mention either Eichengrn or Hoffmann in his scientific papers.Bayer coined the name Aspirin for its new product, and it was off to the races with

respect to sales and profits.

Bayer wanted to corner the large potential

aspirin market in the United States and at the

same time avoid the country's high import duties.

In 1903, it began a large aspirin plant in

Rensselaer, New York. Holding the U.S. patent

on aspirin and its trade name as well, Bayer was

well-positioned to capture the minds and

pocketbooks of a large portion of the Americancitizenry. But Bayer could not foresee World

War I and that its U.S. assets would be seized by the U.S. government and sold at

auction. The highest bidder, Sterling Drug Company, bought not only Bayer's

assets, but also its rights to its name and to the famous trademark of BAYER

crossed vertically with BAYER at the Y.

Even before the breakup of Bayer, contraband

formulators and smugglers had been making sure that

cheaper, albeit illegal, aspirin graced the shelves of the

drugstores of North and South America. Many of these

products, the fake aspirin alluded to above, were simplycornstarch, or some aspirin mixed with cornstarch or any other white, powdery

substance that was cheap and available. In some instances, the formulators simply

mixed SA with some sodium acetate salt, but left it chemically unreacted.

If you were a government sleuth at the time, how could you distinguish fake aspirin

from real aspirin? Could you design an experiment that would tell you if you had a

non-ASA product on your hands or ASA mixed with other ingredients? You can do

just that in the activity

Bayeraspirin packaged for sale in

Israel, featuring the crossed-namelogo.

sodium acetate

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