Opium - What Is It Made Of?
What Is It Made Of?
Opium contains as many as fifty substances called alkaloidsA nitrogen-containing substance found in plants.—naturally occurring chemicals with mind-altering characteristics. The main derivatives of opium are morphine, codeine, and thebaine. Morphine and codeine are used as painkillers, cough
suppressants, and, in some cases, as cures for diarrhea. Thebaine is added to synthetic (laboratory-made) painkillers called opioidsA substance created in a laboratory to mimic the effects of naturally occurring opiates such as heroin and morphine..
Opium comes from a flowering plant that must be started from seed each growing season. It takes about 120 days for the plant to grow, flower, and produce the seeds needed for next year's crop. When it flowers, the opium poppy plant is beautiful. It is like the field of poppies in the film The Wizard of Oz that puts Dorothy, Toto, and the Cowardly Lion to sleep. Opium poppy flowers range from white to pink to deeper shades of red and purple. The plant does best in soil that contains some sand and loam, and it can thrive in highland meadows as well as warm, dry climates.
The plant flowers after ninety days and stands between three- and five-feet tall. When the flower petals fall off the pods, farmers begin the opium harvest. Where the plant is grown legally, machines are used to grind up whole fields into poppy straw. It is from this straw that legal morphine, codeine, and thebaine are produced. More than 1, 000 tons of morphine are produced legally from opium every year, from poppies grown on government-regulated farms in India, Turkey, and the Australian province of Tasmania.
Illegal Farming
In the illegal poppy fields, opium is collected by hand. Farmers use special knives to slice the pods that still remain on the plant. If done carefully, the slicing forces the pods to leak a white fluid for several days. Overnight, the fluid thickens and turns into a dark-colored paste. In the morning the farmer passes through the field and collects the paste from each pod. A few of the largest pods are left to ripen without being sliced. From these the farmers will collect the seeds for the next year's harvest.
Illegal hand-collected opium yields about seven to thirteen pounds per acre of poppies. Once the fluid has been harvested from the plant, it is allowed to dry in the sun until it becomes a thick, dark-brown, sticky gum. This is raw opium. Even at this stage people have smoked or eaten it to get high. Usually, however, the raw opium is boiled with water and strained through cloth to remove plant debris and further concentrate the psychoactive substances. This "cooked" opium will not spoil, even if kept for years.
The vast majority of illegal opium is then converted into morphine, which is then turned into heroin. These processes occur in mobile laboratories in the countries in which the poppies are grown. These countries include Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico, and Lebanon. In these nations, political corruption and police bribes allow farmers and chemists to work with little regard for the law.
Illegal poppy farming can be bad for the environment. Farmers use slash-and-burn techniques to clear fields of native wild plants in order to grow the crop. They may fertilize poppies with human waste, chicken droppings, or other fertilizers that leave toxins in the soil. The techniques used to refine opium into morphine and heroin also produce toxic chemical waste that is dumped into waterways or left in empty fields. Law enforcement efforts to curb poppy production have included the spraying of fields with plant-killers, including Agent Orange, a poisonous substance linked to human illness.
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