
A Way to Brew Morphine Raises Concerns Over Regulation - dbcooper
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/health/a-way-to-brew-morphine-raises-concerns-over-regulation.html?_r=0
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jdreaver
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.

~~~
bko
I was surprised to learn the prevalence of illegal substances in prisons [0].
If authorities are unable to curtail access to drugs in one of the most
controlled environments in the country, what hope do they have of removing
them from the streets? Seems like a lost cause.

[0] [http://nakedlaw.avvo.com/crime/how-common-are-drugs-in-
priso...](http://nakedlaw.avvo.com/crime/how-common-are-drugs-in-prison.html)

~~~
x0x0
I believe you fundamentally misunderstand.

In order to believe that the authorities really think they can remove drugs,
you'd have to assume they continue to hold this belief in spite of 44 years of
post war-on-drugs evidence. I mean, I think cops are authoritarian idiots, but
they're not _that_ stupid. As Bill Hicks said, we had a war on drugs, and the
people on drugs won. They're more pure and often cheaper than ever.

Rather, the war on drugs is a way to systematically deprive people of civil
rights and transfer control to police. Not to mention all the private prison
vendors who are making bank. And the military industrial complex selling
weapons to the police. Seen from this angle, actions make sense.

After all, we've never really had a war on drugs -- we've had a war on some
classes (black, poor) of people who use some (crack bad! coke ok! heroin bad!
adderall good! xanax good!) drugs.

~~~
the_watcher
I don't think it's hopeless, it's just that focusing on removing the supply
without solving the root cause (namely that there is major, lucrative demand)
is a waste of resources.

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avivo
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
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
>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
I'd argue that they are killing their competitors not customers

~~~
joe_the_user
Sure but the original argument was that the drug cartels have a tremendous
potential for violence. That seems established and the "customer" part's a red
haring.

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Animats
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.tot...](https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/cocaine.total.synthesis.html)

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NoMoreNicksLeft
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.

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dbcooper
Links to the paper [1] and commentary [2] in Nature Chemical Biology:

[1]
[http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...](http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchembio.1816.html)

[2] [http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew-
opiates-...](http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew-
opiates-1.17563)

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forgottenpass
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.

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zxcvcxz
Could you genetically modify yeast to produce LSD?

~~~
undersuit
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.

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api
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.

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droithomme
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.

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MichaelCrawford
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.

~~~
fapjacks
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
I'm curious, has he avoided opium addiction or is it just that the effects of
addiction are less bad than his pain?

~~~
fapjacks
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.

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carsongross
Short Afghanistan.

