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MPPP – The first 'designer drug' disaster (2023)

 The origin of the term is credited to Dr Gary L. Henderson, of the University of California at Davis.

In 1982, Dr J. William Langston, the Director of Neurology of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Centre in San José, was called in to examine George Carillo, a 42-year-old heroin addict who had just been admitted into the centre’s locked psychiatry unit. Eventually George, Juanita and Connie were able to receive an experimental surgery in Sweden, during which they underwent transplanting substantia nigra cells from aborted foetuses into the damaged parts of their brains, and this helped them recover much of their motor function. When Langston followed up the original 1947 synthesis of MPPP by going to the library of Stanford University, he found that the paper by Ziering and Lee had been cut out from the volume of Journal of Organic Chemistry with a razor blade.

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