5 ms·

A Way to Brew Morphine Raises Concerns Over Regulation

29 points by dbcooper 11y ago

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
Kuro5hin's trane claims that it has been legal to grow opium poppies in the US since the early seventies. You can use them for ornamentation, to eat the seeds and so on but not for use as a drug. I haven't actually looked but expect there is wild opium growing in the high desert of california.
- Aloisius 11y ago
  They are listed as a scheduled substance - including both the flower and straw meaning you can't actually grow them, but no one enforces it for ornamental purposes.
  - athenot 11y ago
    It's my understanding that the ornamental ones, being bred for the flowers, don't have much in terms of opiates. </gardener>
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Papaver somniferum is a large, pretty flower. As nice as most other poppies. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Papaver_somniferum_(2).jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Papaver_somniferum_(2...
    - blacksmith_tb 11y ago
      As the famous Michael Pollan article notes[0], P. somniferum is also sold as P. paeoniflorum, there's very little oversight. And of course if there was, the DEA would have to burn down lots of gardens. P. Bracteatum contains thebaine and can be used to produce codeine with a little ochem[1] and I see it growing in plenty of yards. 0: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/opium-made-easy/ http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/opium-made-easy/ 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_bracteatum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_bracteatum
- jcknight 11y ago
  A few years ago I was introduced to a fellow through an acquaintance of mine. We were attending a BBQ one evening and I noticed what looked to be poppies growing in a planter. So I asked him about it and he confirmed my suspicions. According to him, the area (Northern California valley) was great for growing them. I had no idea and had never seen any in person.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  A very good childhood friend of mine has been growing small amounts papaver somniferum (opium poppies) in his back yard because it is much cheaper than prescription pain killers. He was injured in a car accident and has lived with debilitating pain most of his adult life.
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    I'm curious, has he avoided opium addiction or is it just that the effects of addiction are less bad than his pain?
    - fapjacks 11y ago
      We have always generally been pretty responsible drug users throughout our lives, and so he knows how to avoid addiction, or to minimize its affect on him. Opioids are easy to escalate in dose and frequency, and for some years I was prescribed oxycodone for my pain, but I did not abuse it, because I had his help in avoiding addiction. I think education is the best tool to avoid this.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  I'd never thought about it before, but poppy-seed muffins are fairly popular in Western culture; what is the source of all of those seeds? Is it a similar situation as Coca-Cola has with the DEA?
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    There are different varieties of poppies. Some are unsuitable for narcotics production as they don't produce the opiates in question. Still, consider the following information which I had assumed to be an urban legend but is apparently true: http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/poppyseed.asp http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/poppyseed.asp
    - stephengillie 11y ago
      Will those unsuitable for narcotics production still yield a positive test result? Also it highly interests me to find an edge case that various law-enforcement agencies haven't handled at all.
      - wavefunction 11y ago
        I'm not sure and can't do any quick research as I'm at work. I'm generally interested in traditional pharmacology but have to admit that opiates don't interest me very much compared to other naturally occurring psychoactive substances.
dbcooper 11y ago
Links to the paper [1] and commentary [2] in Nature Chemical Biology: [1] http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchembio.1816.html http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc... [2] http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew-opiates-1.17563 http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew-opiates-...
jdreaver 11y ago
Dr Oye wants us to seriously entertain the idea that if we simply regulate drug production then we would be safe from drug cartels? Regulation is not a magic cure for basic human behavior. If people want drugs, they will get them, and there will be others to make it. Any time you make a law restricting the production of drugs, you are simply removing competition for those that don't follow the law. Drug cartels would be stopped in their tracks if the US ended the war on drugs. I also find it curious that he comments on big pharma already having access to abundant supplies of opium, but it would be disaster if local producers could produce morphine or heroine. God forbid anyone else undercuts them with a cheaper-to-produce product. Any talk of how to better fight the drug war is just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Drug use is a medical and social issue, not a criminal one. The attitude of drugs as a criminal issue is also one of the reasons the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. I am frankly tired of being fed the notion that the existence of drugs is a constant danger to society, and the only way out is to fight a never-ending war.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  I couldn't have said it better myself. You are absolutely spot on. Thanks.
- feld 11y ago
  I'm just going to quote this from now on.
- Nadya 11y ago
  Then there is Portugal. Decriminalization of most drugs and instead of giving prison time they give treatment. >The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,0... If you create a black market for something - it is often less regulated, more dangerous, and more criminal than what you are trying to ban.
  - simplemath 11y ago
zxcvcxz 11y ago
Could you genetically modify yeast to produce LSD?
- undersuit 11y ago
  LSD was accidentally discovered while looking into variations of chemicals made by Ergot. Maybe it would be easier to modify yeast, maybe it would be easier to modify ergot.
forgottenpass 11y ago
Calling the FBI is the alternative to the top-down approach? Thank you Supervisory Special Agent for letting me know that as long as we call before a crime is committed, that makes the FBI a community level grassroots organization.
carsongross 11y ago
Short Afghanistan.
avivo 11y ago
Scary stuff. Not because of the reasons cited in the article -- but because I hadn't previously realized that drug cartels have obvious incentives to invest in synthetic biology expertise. That sort of capability can later be directed to applications such as massive destruction, or even extortion of nation states. Not to mention experimental organisms wrecking ecosystems. These dangers would (and have) made wonderful movie plots and I'd prefer them to stay on the big screen. One obstacle in the past has been that the transition from "make lots drugs and robust transportation/communication networks" to "make weapons of mass destruction" has been so long as to be irrelevant. There was no plausible organizational evolutionary path from one to the other. But perhaps that has changed. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of applications of synthetic biology to drug creation. Imagine what the word would look like if you could make nuclear bombs using the same tech used to produce heroine. Would drug cartels have a thriving side business selling them to ____? Would any nation state be able to control the cartels at all?
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them. Now this tech in some crazy hands is dangerous. But with the power amplification in modern times - Two generations ago - a person could create a small business or small terrorist act alone. 10 years ago it was possible to have a thousand person billion dollar company and 9/11 ... Now we have a billion dollar company with single digit numbers of employees and we will have the first billion dollar one man company in the next 5-10 years. I leave the rest to your imagination. But you should not be worried from terrorist organisations - disgruntled lone wolves will be the real danger.
  - IndianAstronaut 11y ago
    >Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them. I highly suggest you look up the Zetas cartel and their methodologies.
    - throwawayornot 11y ago
Animats 11y ago
The track record of the illegal drug industry in organic chemistry is not impressive. They can't make consistently good LSD or MDMA. Both of those are difficult to do right and require frequent analysis with expensive equipment to control the process. They can't even make methamphetamine without screwing up. There's a direct synthesis for cocaine. It's documented.[1] The drug cartels are still doing it the old fashioned way, growing coca. With most pharmaceuticals, the quality control costs more than the production. So this is probably not a major problem. [1] https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/cocaine.total.synthesis.html https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/cocaine.tot...
api 11y ago
This is the tip of a large iceberg. There is no reason all sorts of drugs can't be made in this way. Get a bit of that yeast and you can do it yourself.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
Heroin should be legal for anyone to purchase aged 21 or over. Sell it off of liquor store shelves in clean, measured doses, with single-use needles. All sealed up with tamper-proof packaging. Let the big pharmaceutical companies manufacture it. They can do it so cheap they'll drive the cartels out of business. It's amazing that anyone could think that this could be a problem.
droithomme 11y ago
It's completely legal to grow opium poppies, it's just not legal to extract the sap, or to process it. It's also a simpler way to get started producing morphine than to be doing cutting edge genetically engineering of bacteria to produce it as a byproduct of sugar digestion.

29 points by dbcooper 11y ago

Kuro5hin's trane claims that it has been legal to grow opium poppies in the US since the early seventies. You can use them for ornamentation, to eat the seeds and so on but not for use as a drug. I haven't actually looked but expect there is wild opium growing in the high desert of california.

Aloisius 11y ago
They are listed as a scheduled substance - including both the flower and straw meaning you can't actually grow them, but no one enforces it for ornamental purposes.
- athenot 11y ago
  It's my understanding that the ornamental ones, being bred for the flowers, don't have much in terms of opiates. </gardener>
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Papaver somniferum is a large, pretty flower. As nice as most other poppies. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Papaver_somniferum_(2).jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Papaver_somniferum_(2...
  - blacksmith_tb 11y ago
    As the famous Michael Pollan article notes[0], P. somniferum is also sold as P. paeoniflorum, there's very little oversight. And of course if there was, the DEA would have to burn down lots of gardens. P. Bracteatum contains thebaine and can be used to produce codeine with a little ochem[1] and I see it growing in plenty of yards. 0: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/opium-made-easy/ http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/opium-made-easy/ 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_bracteatum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_bracteatum
jcknight 11y ago
A few years ago I was introduced to a fellow through an acquaintance of mine. We were attending a BBQ one evening and I noticed what looked to be poppies growing in a planter. So I asked him about it and he confirmed my suspicions. According to him, the area (Northern California valley) was great for growing them. I had no idea and had never seen any in person.
fapjacks 11y ago
A very good childhood friend of mine has been growing small amounts papaver somniferum (opium poppies) in his back yard because it is much cheaper than prescription pain killers. He was injured in a car accident and has lived with debilitating pain most of his adult life.
- joshuapants 11y ago
  I'm curious, has he avoided opium addiction or is it just that the effects of addiction are less bad than his pain?
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    We have always generally been pretty responsible drug users throughout our lives, and so he knows how to avoid addiction, or to minimize its affect on him. Opioids are easy to escalate in dose and frequency, and for some years I was prescribed oxycodone for my pain, but I did not abuse it, because I had his help in avoiding addiction. I think education is the best tool to avoid this.
stephengillie 11y ago
I'd never thought about it before, but poppy-seed muffins are fairly popular in Western culture; what is the source of all of those seeds? Is it a similar situation as Coca-Cola has with the DEA?
- wavefunction 11y ago
  There are different varieties of poppies. Some are unsuitable for narcotics production as they don't produce the opiates in question. Still, consider the following information which I had assumed to be an urban legend but is apparently true: http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/poppyseed.asp http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/poppyseed.asp
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Will those unsuitable for narcotics production still yield a positive test result? Also it highly interests me to find an edge case that various law-enforcement agencies haven't handled at all.
    - wavefunction 11y ago
      I'm not sure and can't do any quick research as I'm at work. I'm generally interested in traditional pharmacology but have to admit that opiates don't interest me very much compared to other naturally occurring psychoactive substances.

dbcooper 11y ago

Links to the paper [1] and commentary [2] in Nature Chemical Biology: [1] http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchembio.1816.html http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc... [2] http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew-opiates-1.17563 http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew-opiates-...

jdreaver 11y ago

Dr Oye wants us to seriously entertain the idea that if we simply regulate drug production then we would be safe from drug cartels? Regulation is not a magic cure for basic human behavior. If people want drugs, they will get them, and there will be others to make it. Any time you make a law restricting the production of drugs, you are simply removing competition for those that don't follow the law. Drug cartels would be stopped in their tracks if the US ended the war on drugs. I also find it curious that he comments on big pharma already having access to abundant supplies of opium, but it would be disaster if local producers could produce morphine or heroine. God forbid anyone else undercuts them with a cheaper-to-produce product. Any talk of how to better fight the drug war is just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Drug use is a medical and social issue, not a criminal one. The attitude of drugs as a criminal issue is also one of the reasons the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. I am frankly tired of being fed the notion that the existence of drugs is a constant danger to society, and the only way out is to fight a never-ending war.

fapjacks 11y ago
I couldn't have said it better myself. You are absolutely spot on. Thanks.
feld 11y ago
I'm just going to quote this from now on.
Nadya 11y ago
Then there is Portugal. Decriminalization of most drugs and instead of giving prison time they give treatment. >The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,0... If you create a black market for something - it is often less regulated, more dangerous, and more criminal than what you are trying to ban.
- simplemath 11y ago

zxcvcxz 11y ago

Could you genetically modify yeast to produce LSD?

undersuit 11y ago
LSD was accidentally discovered while looking into variations of chemicals made by Ergot. Maybe it would be easier to modify yeast, maybe it would be easier to modify ergot.

forgottenpass 11y ago

Calling the FBI is the alternative to the top-down approach? Thank you Supervisory Special Agent for letting me know that as long as we call before a crime is committed, that makes the FBI a community level grassroots organization.

carsongross 11y ago

Short Afghanistan.

avivo 11y ago

Scary stuff. Not because of the reasons cited in the article -- but because I hadn't previously realized that drug cartels have obvious incentives to invest in synthetic biology expertise. That sort of capability can later be directed to applications such as massive destruction, or even extortion of nation states. Not to mention experimental organisms wrecking ecosystems. These dangers would (and have) made wonderful movie plots and I'd prefer them to stay on the big screen. One obstacle in the past has been that the transition from "make lots drugs and robust transportation/communication networks" to "make weapons of mass destruction" has been so long as to be irrelevant. There was no plausible organizational evolutionary path from one to the other. But perhaps that has changed. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of applications of synthetic biology to drug creation. Imagine what the word would look like if you could make nuclear bombs using the same tech used to produce heroine. Would drug cartels have a thriving side business selling them to ____? Would any nation state be able to control the cartels at all?

venomsnake 11y ago
Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them. Now this tech in some crazy hands is dangerous. But with the power amplification in modern times - Two generations ago - a person could create a small business or small terrorist act alone. 10 years ago it was possible to have a thousand person billion dollar company and 9/11 ... Now we have a billion dollar company with single digit numbers of employees and we will have the first billion dollar one man company in the next 5-10 years. I leave the rest to your imagination. But you should not be worried from terrorist organisations - disgruntled lone wolves will be the real danger.
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago
  >Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them. I highly suggest you look up the Zetas cartel and their methodologies.
  - throwawayornot 11y ago

Animats 11y ago

The track record of the illegal drug industry in organic chemistry is not impressive. They can't make consistently good LSD or MDMA. Both of those are difficult to do right and require frequent analysis with expensive equipment to control the process. They can't even make methamphetamine without screwing up. There's a direct synthesis for cocaine. It's documented.[1] The drug cartels are still doing it the old fashioned way, growing coca. With most pharmaceuticals, the quality control costs more than the production. So this is probably not a major problem. [1] https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/cocaine.total.synthesis.html https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/cocaine.tot...

api 11y ago

This is the tip of a large iceberg. There is no reason all sorts of drugs can't be made in this way. Get a bit of that yeast and you can do it yourself.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

Heroin should be legal for anyone to purchase aged 21 or over. Sell it off of liquor store shelves in clean, measured doses, with single-use needles. All sealed up with tamper-proof packaging. Let the big pharmaceutical companies manufacture it. They can do it so cheap they'll drive the cartels out of business. It's amazing that anyone could think that this could be a problem.

droithomme 11y ago

It's completely legal to grow opium poppies, it's just not legal to extract the sap, or to process it. It's also a simpler way to get started producing morphine than to be doing cutting edge genetically engineering of bacteria to produce it as a byproduct of sugar digestion.