Speaking of Narcotics - What is this I am Taking (Morphine Sulfate CR)

Factual Questions
1

Life is a caberet, old chum…

No more of those wimpy “hydro…” drugs for the boy.

Movin’ on up…

OK, I like bad music.

Now, aside from the CR, which, I take it, means “continous release”, what, if any, difference is there between the “sulfate” version and plain old morphine? Is this functionally identical to straight morphine, or does the tweaking to delay release also modify the fundamental structure of the drug?
(I can’t read entry-level chem. structures, let alone this stuff)

Thanks

2

Plain old morphine (free base) isn’t very soluble in water. Most (all?) formulations of morphine are various salts of morphine where the free base is protonated, giving it a positive charge, and that charge is balanced with a negative counterion (in this case, a sulfate group), forming a salt (in this case, morphine sulfate). The salt likes to dissolve in water, and will give off the proton in the appropriate region of the body, reconstituting the neutral base, which will be able to cross membranes. General rule in pharmacology is charged species do not cross membranes, while neutral species do.

Another common morphine salt is morphine hydrochloride, where the free base is processed with hydrochloric acid (HCl), using the proton to charge the morphine and balancing that charge with the chloride counterion.

If you tweak the molecular structure properly, you can get different absorption/activity/elimination profiles, but at that point you have a different drug of the same class, not just a new formulation. It’ll be called something else. An extended release formulation would perhaps use a different salt, but mostly it’s a property of how the drug is packaged - coatings, binders, fillers, etc. There’s a whole art and science to delivery mechanism engineering.

3

As Crescend said, Morphine Sulfate (or MSO4) is just the salt form of Morphine. Most medications come in a salt form to make it soluble in the body. MSO4 is “plain old morphine”, at least it is what everyone thinks of when they talk about Morphine.

4

Thanks!
Crescend - I think I caught about 10% of that - but it did answer the question of why so many drugs end in HCL, and what does hydrocloric acid have to do with a runney nose?
Hirka - thanks for the translation.