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Genetically Engineered Yeast Makes It Possible To Brew Morphine
PvtVoid writes: The New York times reports that newly developed yeast strains will soon make it possible to create morphine from fermentation of sugar. While no one has claimed to make morphine in lab from scratch yet, concerns are already being raised about potential abuse. According to the Times article: "This rapid progress in synthetic biology has set off a debate about how — and whether — to regulate it. Dr. Oye and other experts said this week in a commentary in Nature Chemical Biology that drug-regulatory authorities are ill prepared to control a process that will benefit the heroin trade much more than the prescription painkiller industry. The world should take steps to head that off, they argue, by locking up the bioengineered yeast strains and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them.
Forget morphine - could I just get a way to simply, legally obtain sudafed without rigamarole at the pharmacy?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I think its inevitable that the drug cartels will find a way to get this. The answer to the drug problem is legalisation and regulation, treat addiction as the disease it is!
But they can prevent even a few spores from getting into the hands of the cartels.
Truthfully it would be the cartels who would fight a desperate drug war to keep this production democratizing yeast out of the hands of home brew street dealers and junkies killing off their trillion dollar middleman industry and their other side of the drug war profits with it.
This is dangerous as it would take all of the violence and money form the heroin trade.
Now buying homebrewing gear will join buying hydroponic gardening equipment on the list of 'completely legal things most likely to cause the DEA to batter down your door and shoot your dog.'
That'll be fun.
There has been practically zero progress on handling the demand side. Doing so would require a radical rethink of how Western countries deal with drugs and drug addiction. This is not likely to happen in the next 20 years at least, and it is stupid to condemn other countries to 20 more years of violence by keeping our focus on limiting supply.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
At this point, anyone who uses hard drugs in the US is doing so after years of being told all of the nasty things they do to your body. There's no curing that level of stupid. There's a percentage of the population that in the absence of morphine, will abuse bath salts and model glue. No law can fix that complete lack of long term thinking.
Unfortunately, the one effective treatment for opioid addiction is Ibogaine, and medical study or application of it in America is illegal because it is a schedule 1 drug
Yippee for 'Merica shooting itself in the foot for over 200 years
Wherever You Go, There You Are
And all our soldiers will have died for nothing, since that is why they are there, to keep the pipeline open.
No the war was fought to bring to everyone the God-given right to drink alcohol and for women the right to wear bikinis... The tradeoff is we also fought for the right for women drivers. Some tradeoffs are worth it, though... ;^)
and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them
One problem there - Humans contain the DNA for producing morphine. It works so well precisely because out body already uses it to regulate our natural pain response.
oh, I dunno...figuring out how to not ensure demand stays at 100%.
An obvious first step is to start treating addiction as a medical problem rather than as a criminal problem. Maybe we should spend less on police and prison guards, and more on doctors and nurses.
We already did eliminate the need to grow opium and all opioids used in American pharmaceuticals come from a coal-tar process.
This was supposed to bring about the end of illegal opium and heroin, but has not had the effect because it is very hard to get people to stop growing a plant that they can get paid lots of money for.
Countries like Hungary allow farmers to grow a limited amount of poppies, which are purchased for use in the European pharma industry. This allows the farmers to make money and keeps it from becoming heroin
There is no reason to believe that creating new ways to synthesize opioids will reduce the growing of poppies
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Who gives @#$*( if people start brewing narcotics at home.
The same people who take the time to airbrush and blur out a boob on a Picasso, that's who. The best part is this kind of person thinks it is doing the world a favor.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There has been practically zero progress on handling the demand side. Doing so would require a radical rethink of how Western countries deal with drugs and drug addiction. This is not likely to happen in the next 20 years at least, and it is stupid to condemn other countries to 20 more years of violence by keeping our focus on limiting supply.
In Canada (at least in Sydney, Nova Scotia), addicts get their fix right at the hospital. For free.
It seems stupid at first, but it is extremely effective in reducing all kinds of crime related to drugs and addiction. Nobody there is breaking into houses or summer cabins looking for painkillers or goods to pawn. Nobody is stealing car stereos and pawning them to finance their habit. The number of people mixing dangerous chemicals in their house or garage is reduced. Why bother with all that when you just go to the hospital and get your legal high for free? Product originating from Taliban-controlled areas can't compete with free.
If Marijuana is more your style, they have medical marijuana laws and lax enforcement of recreational use. The end result is that local people grow it in their basements, cutting out any foreign supplier or middlemen. Marijuana isn't free, but I have yet to hear of any case where someone broke the law in order to get money to buy weed.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
You are playing word games
An addict can either pay for heroin, or pay for a substitute like methadone (assuming that they want to get off of heroin)
If they decide to use heroin for their addiction, then they are criminals because there is no legal way to get heroin in America.
This is very expensive and in many cases requires that they either steal from others, or sell heroin themselves. These are both criminal activities
We have a lot of 'prevention' activities going on right now. They seem to be ineffective. One big problem with them is that they have created a large blackmarket infrastructure that is particularly good at finding and supplying new customers.
Portugal has decriminalized all drugs and as a result reduced the number of new users, which is to say that decriminalization is the path to prevention
Try selling that idea in America
Wherever You Go, There You Are