Amphetamine - History

History

Amphetamine was first synthesized in 1887 by the Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu in Berlin, Germany. He named the compound phenylisopropylamine. It was one of a series of compounds related to the plant derivative ephedrine, which had been isolated from the plant Ma-Huang (Ephedra) that same year by Nagayoshi Nagai. No pharmacological use was found for amphetamine until 1927, when pioneer psychopharmacologist Gordon Alles resynthesized and tested it on himself, in search of an artificial replacement for ephedrine. From 1933 or 1934 Smith, Kline and French began selling the volatile base form of the drug as an inhaler under the trade name Benzedrine, useful as a decongestant but readily usable for other purposes. One of the first attempts at using amphetamine as a scientific study was done by M. H. Nathanson, a Los Angeles physician, in 1935. He studied the subjective effects of amphetamine in 55 hospital workers who were each given 20 mg of Benzedrine. The two most commonly reported drug effects were "a sense of well being and a feeling of exhilaration" and "lessened fatigue in reaction to work". During World War II amphetamine was extensively used to combat fatigue and increase alertness in soldiers. After decades of reported abuse, the FDA banned Benzedrine inhalers, and limited amphetamine to prescription use in 1965, but non-medical use remained common. Amphetamine became a schedule II drug in the USA under the Controlled Substances Act in 1971.

The related compound methamphetamine, in its crystallized form, was first synthesized from ephedrine in Japan in 1920 by chemist Akira Ogata, via reduction of ephedrine using red phosphorus and iodine. The pharmaceutical Pervitin was a tablet of 3 mg methamphetamine that was available in Germany from 1938 and widely used in the Wehrmacht, but by mid-1941 it became a controlled substance, despite this new classification, methamphetamine and the cocaine-derivative referred to as "Codename D-IX" were distributed by military doctors across both the Western and Eastern theatres of war. During the course of the war over 200 million Pervitin pills were prescribed to Wehrmacht combatants.

In 1997 and 1998, researchers at Texas A&M University claimed to have found amphetamine and methamphetamine in the foliage of two Acacia species native to Texas, A. berlandieri and A. rigidula. Previously, both of these compounds had been thought to be human inventions. These findings have never been duplicated, and the analyses are believed by many biochemists to be the result of experimental error, and as such the validity of the report has come into question. Alexander Shulgin, one of the most experienced biochemical investigators and the discoverer of many new psychotropic substances, has tried to contact the Texas A&M researchers and verify their findings. The authors of the paper have not responded; natural amphetamine remains an unconfirmed discovery.