Interesting Facts For Curious Minds: 1572 Random But Mind-Blowing Facts About History, Science, Pop Culture And Everything In Between
Drugs, Legal And Otherwise
by testsuphomeAdminYou are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.
DRUGS, LEGAL AND OTHERWISE
� The name “heroin” was coined by the German pharmaceutical
company Bayer in the late 1800s. It was taken from the German word,
heroisch, which means “strong” or “heroic.”
� The once quite popular benzodiazepine, Valium, was named for the
Latin word vale, which means “goodnight.” Valium is known to put
people out for the night.
� Scopolamine is often prescribed for motion sickness, but some have
found more nefarious uses for it. There have been 50,000 cases of it
used in Columbia alone where it’s been used to render victims
unconscious and rob them.
� At the end of 2020, the global pharmaceutical industry was valued at
$1.27 trillion. That’s a big jump from 2001 when it was valued at only
$390 billion!
� Hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms were taken by many different
American Indian peoples as part of religious rituals. The Aztecs even
referred to one species as the “divine mushroom.”
� Nutmeg contains a chemical called myristicin that has psychoactive
properties. Don’t worry, though, most people have to ingest quite a bit
to feel any kind of high.
� Cockroaches are a common prescription for burns, ulcers, and
tuberculosis in China and South Korea. Roaches are also a common
ingredient in cosmetics in those countries.
� It’s commonly believed that the Netherlands was the first country to
legalize recreational cannabis use, but Uruguay was the first to do so
in 2013.
� In the 1980s, ethnobotanist Wade Davis claimed that Haitian Voodoo
zombies were created by a combination of tetrodotoxin from a
pufferfish and bufotoxin from a toad. They were then “reanimated”
with a natural drug, datura.
� The US FDA declared cigarettes as “drug delivery devices” in 1995.
But in 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the FDA couldn’t regulate
tobacco as a drug.
� Rimonabant is a prescription drug used to treat severe obesity that hit
the European market in 2006 but was pulled in 2008. It caused
depression in 10% and suicidal thoughts in 1% of patients.
� Johnson and Johnson is the largest pharmaceutical company in the
world by market capitalization, at $473.06 billion. J&J was also the
number one company in revenue in 2021.
� Heroin was marketed and sold as a cough suppressant in the US from
1895 until 1924. Congress realized that heroin did stop coughs, but it
turned users into junkies.
� The opioid morphine gets its name from the Greek god of sleep,
Morpheus. Will you take the blue or red pill?
� Dextromethorphan (DXM) is a compound found in many cough
medicines, such as Robitussin DM. High enough doses of DXM can
cause intoxication that is sometimes referred to as “Robo tripping.”
� Pharmaceutical science as it’s known today only dates back to the
1800s, but the earliest written prescriptions were made in ancient
Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
� The CIA dosed at least hundreds of unknowing subjects with LSD as
part of the MKUltra Project from 1953 to 1973. The project resulted
in several deaths.
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