I came across this image of a 1901 advertisement for one of Bayer’s pharmaceutical products. Click the image for a larger view.
Yes, it’s genuine. Back then, heroin was prescribed freely by doctors as a sovereign remedy for all sorts of things. Today, it’s one of the most feared and abused illegal narcotics.
Shows how times change . . .
Peter
Heroin as cough syrup? O_o That'll put a different spin on the rappers' "Purple Drank"…
Heroin was initially thought to be less addictive than opium was. Oops.
Modern cough syrup ingredients are fairly eyebrow-raising too. Dextromethorphan is one of the dissociative anesthetics- same family as ketamine and PCP. It just takes much higher doses of the stuff to act like that; in a teaspoon of Nyquil it's just a mildly zonking antitussive.
I have the suspicion that if there weren't such a general dearth of effective antitussive drugs that didn't do something worse, dextromethorphan would have disappeared off shelves long ago.