Regarding the Brompton cocktail, a mixture of heroin and cocaine that was used for severe pain in terminally ill patients (Letters, 6 May), the Glasgow recipe was heroin, cocaine, gin, Largactil and honey. It could be alarmingly effective. Many years ago, my late partner, faced with a patient in intractable pain, issued a prescription for the cocktail.
In the middle of evening surgery, my partner was called to an emergency at the local pub. The patient had felt so much better, he decided to go for a drink, and the combination of the Brompton plus the traditional “hauf an’ a hauf” (whisky and ale), had proved too much. He was carried home and told to stick to soft drinks.
Peter Waterson
Glasgow
• As an excise officer in the 1970s, I used to visit Huddersfield Royal Infirmary to authorise spirit repayment claims on excise duty on spirits used in the preparation of Brompton cocktails. I doubt very much if similar visits are made nowadays, but it made the work of excise officers interesting.
John Garforth
Ilkley, West Yorkshire
• I too was an apprentice pharmacist working in a pit village in the Yorkshire coalfield in the early 1960s when we received a prescription for a Brompton cocktail with varied strengths of morphine and cocaine, together with whisky and chloroform water, for a man who we knew to be terminally ill with lung disease.
The prescription was presented by his wife with the message: “And he says can he have Johnnie Walker.” We complied of course!
Brian Sandall
Whitstable, Kent
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