What is morphine? What is it used for?
What is heroin? What do you know about it?
Questions:
What do they have in common?
What are functional groups?
Use the following references:
Morphine, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphine
Heroin, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin
Answers:
1. Morphine a potent opiate analgesic psychoactive drug and is considered to be the prototypical opioid.In
clinical medicine, morphine is regarded as the gold standard, or benchmark, of analgesics used to relieve
severe or agonizing pain and suffering.
2. Heroin, or diacetylmorphine (INN), also known as diamorphine (BAN), is a semi-synthetic opioid
drug synthesized from morphine, a derivative of the opium poppy. It´s a prohibited drug, abused mainly
for its ability to relieve pain.
What do they have in common?
Heroin was originally marketed as a drug to help people addicted to morphine. As it turns
out, heroin actually turns into morphine when it gets processed by your body, and works
faster.
Heroin was chiefly developed as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants that did not have
morphine's addictive side-effects. Morphine at the time was a popular recreational drug, and Bayer
wished to find a similar but non-addictive substitute to market.However, contrary to Bayer's advertising as
a "non-addictive morphine substitute," heroin would soon have one of the highest rates of dependence
amongst its users.
What are the functional groups?
In organic chemistry, functional groups are specific groups of atoms within molecules that are
responsible for the characteristic chemical reactions of those molecules. The same functional group will
undergo the same or similar chemical reaction(s) regardless of the size of the molecule it is a part of.
The word moiety is often used synonymously to "functional group," but, according to the IUPAC
definition, a moiety is a part of a molecule that may include functional groups as substructures. For
example, an ester is divided into an alcohol moiety and an acyl moiety, but has an ester functional group.
Also, it may be divided intocarboxylate and alkyl moieties. Each moiety may carry any number of
functional groups, for example methyl parahydroxybenzoate carries a phenol functional group in the acyl
moiety.
Combining the names of functional groups with the names of the parent alkanes generates a powerful
systematic nomenclature for naming organic compounds.
The atoms of functional groups are linked to each other and to the rest of the molecule by covalent
bonds. When the group of atoms is associated with the rest of the molecule primarily by ionic forces, the
group is referred to more properly as a polyatomic ion or complex ion. And all of these are called radicals,
by a meaning of the termradical that predates the free radical.