Can anybody tell me who discovered/invented heroin?

I would also like to know what it was intended to be for. Drug addiction was just discussed in class and the topic of drug addiction came up, and this was the bonus question. If I get this right, I get incentives, which I really need. Please include sources. Thank you.
Answer:
Heinrich Dreser, a German physician, discovered heroin in 1895. He mixed acetyls with morphine, and thus, heroin was created. Heroin was then marketed by the Bayer company. At first, it was believed to counter morphine addiction, and that it had no side effects. However, this proved to be untrue.

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1st answer is cool.
You take a poppy, preferably "Papaver somniferum", make little slits on the bud and white stuff oozes out. When it turns dark, it's opium. This is collected and processed into morphine.Further processing creates heroine which, oddly enough, reverts to its morphine state when introduced into one's system.

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LONG ANSWER -

Heroin was first synthesized in 1874 by C.R. Alder Wright, an English chemist working at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, England. He had been experimenting with combining morphine with various acids. He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride over a stove for several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine, now called diacetylmorphine. The compound was sent to F.M. Pierce of Owens College in Manchester for analysis, who reported the following to Wright:

Doses ... were subcutaneously injected into young dogs and rabbits ... with the following general results ... great prostration, fear, and sleepiness speedily following the administration, the eyes being sensitive, and pupils constrict, considerable salivation being produced in dogs, and slight tendency to vomiting in some cases, but no actual emesis. Respiration was at first quickened, but subsequently reduced, and the heart's action was diminished, and rendered irregular. Marked want of coordinating power over the muscular movements, and loss of power in the pelvis and hind limbs, together with a diminution of temperature in the rectum of about 4掳 (rectal failure).[5]
Wright's invention, however, did not lead to any further developments, and heroin became popular after it was independently re-synthesized 23 years later by another chemist, Felix Hoffmann. Hoffmann, working at the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld, Germany, was instructed by his supervisor Heinrich Dreser to acetylate morphine with the objective of producing codeine, a natural derivative of the opium poppy, similar to morphine but less potent and less addictive. But instead of producing codeine, the experiment produced a substance that was actually three times more potent than morphine itself. Bayer would name the substance "heroin", probably from the word heroisch, German for heroic, because in field studies people using the medicine felt "heroic".[6]

From 1898 through to 1910 heroin was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. Bayer marketed heroin as a cure for morphine addiction before it was discovered that heroin is converted to morphine when metabolized in the liver. The company was somewhat embarrassed by this new finding and it became a historical blunder for Bayer.[7]

As with aspirin, Bayer lost some of its trademark rights to heroin following the German defeat in World War I. [8]

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