SCIENTISTS HAD HOPED that morphine could treat opium addiction. Then they had hoped that heroin could treat morphine addiction. It was time to try something else. Again, they would synthetically modify a drug to separate pain relief from addiction. And again, they would fail. This time, spectacularly. To find the next wonder drug, scientists turned to another component of opium: thebaine, named for Thebes, a town in ancient Egypt where the opium poppy was grown. The first synthetic version of thebaine was produced in 1916 by two German chemists working at the University of Frankfurt. They
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