Morphine & Heroin - Periodic Table of Videos

so this is a this is a molecule of morphine I'll just take you around the molecule so we have oxygen in red and the blue one is nitrogen that's really important and the black ones there are carbon so the whole combination of those makes up this quite interesting looking scaffold you can see if you look down there it's kind of t-shaped you've got a fairly flat top and a fairly tall upright bit here and that's really important for the way it interacts morphine obviously is a painkiller a so-called analgesic so morphine and all the oak so called opiate analgesics come from poppy seeds and these poppy seeds produce the most of these compounds when they come from Afghanistan or Pakistan for some reason the the growth of the poppies they're producing much much more of these compounds now there's a problem with that possibly because obviously over the years those countries have had all sorts of political instability there can be issues with getting the the compound out of there and so synthetic chemists have tried to develop syntheses of morphine which wouldn't rely on those countries to source that the wrong feedstock fuel and it's a very complicated molecule as you can see we can make it but it can't be made cheaply enough for it to be commercially viable so another problem with morphine apart from how to source the raw material is that the horrific side effects it's got so it can give you nausea depression it gives respiratory depression slows your breathing down you get tolerance to it so the more you have it the more you need for it to give the same effect and you get terrible withdrawal symptoms as well but the key thing it does have is it is a brilliant analgesic or painkiller the real deep pain like the your broken leg there is nothing else which can ever approach it for that and believe me medicinal chemists have tried all sorts of things they've tried making it it's more complicated and that led to a couple of interesting compounds which actually fitted in the same key hole but didn't produce any pain killing effect at all so in the Second World War obviously supply of of morphine and other painkillers is a real problem and actually the Germans came up with a much simpler compound so if we look at this compound here this is a called me paradeen or pethidine as you'll know it in the hospitals if we overlay those you can see that it it fits pretty well so it interacts this is in the same sort of place here the nitrogen is in the same sort of place it interacts with the same receptor it's about a fifth is active it's more thing it's also much quicker to get in to the receptor do its business and get out so these days this is used in childbirth to help relieve the pain and relax the the mother-to-be now there are various other opiates that you may have heard of and it's amazing what one atom can do really or what one one functional group is we call it as chemists can do so this is morphine so if we pop this one on here that now is coding now codeine is around a hundred times less active than morphine in fact is so relatively safe and inactive you can go and buy it in a chemist is cocoa dermal or other brand names so it's amazing what that one little thing is done it's completely tamed the Beast in many ways encoding has far less of these terrible withdrawal effects as well so if we take that off and we put on a couple of these groups so you can see that there's some more oxygens coming in here these are called acetate groups that now is called heroin which I'm sure you'll have heard of and Herron actually is more active than the morphine very slightly more active and it's also got even worse withdrawal symptoms she's seen Trainspotting you love ye love noticed her not very pleasant it is as I say more active than the morphine so heroin is used in hospitals in in acute cases of deep pain it's not called heroin hospital so I guess that's a slang name which is come around it's called diamorphine because it's a die acetate or acetal morphine and all of these things work by stopping nervous system messages getting to the brain the pain messages so that so the messages are still being sent from the broken limb whatever but it's it's stopping those messages getting to the brain which is why they're so effective in really deep pain yes yes I was playing basketball I landed very badly also once when I had a is and the teeth under my teeth I have a tooth removed and my god that was the worst pain I've had in many many years

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 911,041

Rating: 4.9254341 out of 5

Keywords: morphine, heroin, opiates, painkillers

Id: 8iaYksFXoZQ

Length: 5min 33sec (333 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/myarlak]

As a fairly straight laced individual I can distinctly remember saying "holy shit, now I know why people do drugs" when I got an opiate injection at the hospital when I was in for kidney stones...

[u/[deleted]]

Heroin is/was a brand name not slang.

[u/BritainRitten]

I've always been curious how these compounds actually interact with cells and such to produce their given effect...

[u/Bjehsus]

I like how this guy has a fairly basic knowledge of the subject, and ignores explaining important factors for crappy analogies..

"Morphine comes from poppy seeds"? :/