If you don't know, now you know. Nothing I dislike more than bad drug information being passed off as researched fact.
(The only real issue with "synthetic heroin" is when people cut heroin or other drugs with more powerful ones, like fentanyl, leading to overdoses. Once again, the illegality introduces these dangers.)
Same people probably don't know that Methamphetamine (the evil devil drug) is Schedule II and legally available to be prescribed in the US. And that speed is amphetamines, very similar to meth, and prescribed to 6 yr olds. Or that when your 7-yr-old gets a small surgery, they likely hit her with fentanyl (much, much, stronger than Heroin).
It's just throwing around words to scare and promote ignorance and fear of actual science/medicine.
But heroin was synthesized in 19th century in England and oxycodone in 20th century in Germany, therefore it can't be considered "pre-" heroin, at least not globally. But maybe heroin wasn't common in Germany and therefore oxycodone was pre- in Germany?
Heroin was first marketed by Bayer, a German pharmaceutical company in 1898. That's where the name 'heroin' comes from so oxycodone was definitely not pre- in Germany.
Now, in nazi Germany, opium and products derived from it might have been harder to come by because of import sanctions (that's why methadone, a fully synthetic opioid, was developed in Germany in 1937). But that would apply to oxycodone just as much as heroin.
So no, the author is just full of shit and trying to impress his uninformed readers.
"The head of Bayer's research department reputedly coined the drug's new name, "heroin," based on the German heroisch, which means "heroic, strong.""
edit: remove spurious iPhone capitalizations..
From the article: “After World War II, the Americans who captured Morell translated the word ‘Eukodal’ as ‘Enkodal.’ They thought it was a legitimate medical treatment and dosage.”
Googling "enkodal" finds a bunch of OCR misses from Google Books, where "eukodal" is mistranscribed with an n, and also an article[0] about how Hermann Göring was admitted to a hospital in 1924 to treat his opioid addiction. The article states that he was addicted to Eukodal, and among other things quotes a medical journal where it is mispelled as "Enkodal".