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>Though if heroin was legal it could be manufactured in a sterile environment where you could probably get like 99% purity or something ridiculous like that. T
by JonnieCache 13y ago
>Though if heroin was legal it could be manufactured in a sterile environment where you could probably get like 99% purity or something ridiculous like that.
This already happens. Diamorphine (heroin) is commonly used as a painkiller in hospitals. If you've ever been seriously injured and wound up in hospital with a tube going into your arm attached to a button which gives you a dose of painkiller, limited to something like 3 presses an hour, then you've probably taken heroin, likely in large amounts. The nurse may well have called it "morphine" to avoid scaring you.
Famously, "Heroin" was originally a trademark of the Bayer company.
EDIT: apparently this is only true in the UK. This might be why we don't have the fancy modern opiates here, oxycontin etc.
- falk 13y agoYou are correct. I forgot about our friends across the pond. I believe I read heroin was supposed to be a less addictive alternative of morphine. I don't know much about opioids, I wonder what the breakdown in pricing is between commercial, hospital heroin versus something Oxycontin. I'm guessing it's probably cheaper to produce hospital heroin and drug companies can't compete with it.
- JonnieCache 13y agoAlso consider that the US army burns the enormous afghan poppy harvest every summer while big pharma synthesises its opiate molecules at great expense.