Medicine: New Painkiller

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Time and again painkilling drugs have been touted as more potent than morphine and less likely to cause addiction, only to show, after careful trials, the same drawbacks as the invaluable but dangerous derivative of the opium poppy. Last week Secretary Arthur Flemming of Health, Education and Welfare got himself out on a limb by announcing as "an exciting breakthrough" the development of a new analgesic at the National Institutes of Health. Known so far only as NIH 7519, it appears, he said, to have "painkilling power at least ten times that of morphine." (By this phrasing, scientists do not mean that it can kill pain ten times as severe as morphine does, but that it kills the same pain with one-tenth the dose.) At the same time, said Flemming, "it gives preliminary promise that a partial separation of the analgesic and addicting properties may have been achieved."

Fact is that, so far, NIH 7519 has had such limited trials on human patients that doctors cannot be sure how potent a painkiller it is—or, consequently, what dose to give. Addiction dangers are directly related to continued use. Most of the hopeful evidence on addiction comes from monkeys; though tests are under way with narcotics addicts at the Public Health Service Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky., results are only preliminary.

NIH 7519 has one undeniable advantage. Member of a chemical family called benzomorphans, it is entirely synthetic. If it proves as valuable a morphine substitute as Secretary Flemming hopes, it will free the U.S. of dependence on imported opium, which is becoming harder to get in world markets and might be cut off entirely in global war.