The CBC has an interesting and troubling article about a modified brewer’s yeast that can produce morphine and other opiates from sugar.
The yeast is under strict controls, but so is morphine and that hasn’t been terribly effective. If anyone can produce morphine in a home beer system with sugar, it will be rather difficult to stop people from abusing it.
This makes the whole battle about marijuana rather silly. Morphine will be easier and cheaper to obtain.
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Meanwhile, there’s another piece of research showing that states where medical marijuana is legal have fewer heroin and Oxycontin overdoses than they should be having, compared to states without medical marijuana. Which makes perfect sense since you would have to consume several times your body weight in marijuana in the course of a day in order to OD, and I don’t think even Cheech and Chong managed that back in their heyday.
Having been an excellent beer brewer myself, I do know and understand how yeast mutates… Rather easily, to fit into their current food supply. Now that it’s understood it can be done, then, it will be redone. The Money will not be in the opiates they produce but that there is an available strain that produces it.
Yeah, I know they used gene splicing to get there, something not readily available to amateurs, but there are a lot of amateurs.
In much of the South Oxycontin is easier to get than grass. Actually marijuana is a major cash crop in in Florida. Our last Ag Secretary used to include it in his reports on farming in the state.
The problem for containment is that the process has been published and the gene splicing is apparently not beyond most college labs. With all of the GM seeds most Ag programs probably cover the necessary techniques. The next ‘Breaking Bad’ will feature a botanist instead of a chemist.
Just legalize it, tax it, and move on. Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol won’t work with anything else.
Woohoo! Love morphine! 😉 😆 Never have trouble with it (and never been addicted. I was on morphine for almost 4 weeks a few years ago, and went off it easily). Doc’s always proscribe Oxycodone. I hate it! It doesn’t really work for me, and is addictive as hell! Plain Codeine works well for me also, but that’s harder to get in necessary dosage than morphine without Paracetamol or Ibuprofen.
Oh well. *shrug*
I assume I will be getting something for pain after the surgery. I have never broken a bone or required a stitch, despite being in crashes on land, sea, and air as well as being shot at, shot up, and shot down. They pulled out the shrapnel with tweezers/forceps and didn’t use anything but dressings for the wounds. I have had a number of strains and sprains, but no actual fractures. I have also not had a general anesthesia, just locals, so Thursday will be a first for that.
I let you know what kind of drugs they are handing out down here.
Morphine doesn’t do anything for me. The docs injected me with as much morphine as they felt comfortable giving me when they were trying to debride my foot, and eventually gave up because I was screaming in pain even with enough morphine in me to suffocate a horse and decided to schedule a surgical suite and anesthesiologist instead. I’ve used prescription muscle relaxers for back pain, I quit that because they knock me completely loopy and I don’t like that feeling at all. Heroin has never appealed to me. Too much caffeine makes me completely jittery and paranoid and have panic attacks so meth never appealed to me either, meth being basically caffeine turned up to 11.
In short, I’m a prescribing doctor’s nightmare when it comes to drugs and their effects. Mostly I rely on Advil for pain, with the understanding that too much Advil will tear up my stomach, sigh. But when it gets past that point… well, medical marijuana is legal in my state and looks to me like the best of a bad lot.
After surgery I am cheap to medicate, and easy, too. After my surgery two years ago, the job that left me both short one foot and one foot shorter, I needed about two days worth of something like hydrocodone; after that, I went back to aspirin, with no withdrawal symptoms (most Texans both suffer and speak withdrawl 😈 ) and no significant pain.
Bryan, I too have never broken a (major) bone despite having bicycled actively for 25-30 years and crashed in all the usual ways. Someone who saw me fall in the time trials for the only race I ever tried out for tells me that I relax really well when I go down; it certainly doesn’t feel like relaxation, but I’ll take whatever injury prevention I can get.
I’ve had a cracked wrist and cracked ribs and broken toes and fingers, but nothing that ever required a cast. Looks like I’m going to need surgery on my nose and sinuses though, there seems to be a reservoir of infection up there caused by the nasal polyps, and they’re going to need to get in there and resection everything so the sinuses drain and can flush out any infection. I’m not looking forward to it, but as Steve can tell you, a reservoir of infection makes you feel like cr*p and has to be taken care of if antibiotics won’t do it.
Getting old sucks :(.
More on the morphine — I have pretty good pain tolerance normally. I broke one of my fingers while backpacking on a multi-day trip, I winced and shrugged and kept hiking and didn’t really realize it was broken until a few days later when I realized it was crooked (it’s still crooked, because by the time I got out of the wilderness it had pretty much set that way, I wasn’t interested in calling for a helicopter to extract me because my life was in no way in danger). Didn’t even take an ibuprofen. I think the deal with morphine is that it turns off my normal pain tolerance and replaces it with fuzz. Fuzz can’t tolerate pain the way plain old me can.
“as Steve can tell you, a reservoir of infection makes you feel like cr*p and has to be taken care of” – Badtux
Oh, lordy yes, Badtux! They haven’t figured out yet what triggers Charcot joint (named after the 19th-century French doc Jean-Martin Charcot, who first realized there was a pattern to how the limb, a foot in my case, went bad, or maybe after a gangster whose nickname was Sharko who later moved to France… uh, never mind…) but the upshot is pretty simple: the foot turns so that the sole points inward toward the body’s midline; then it shrivels up (uuuugly!); last of all, in my case at least, it gets infected with a wound that absolutely will not respond to even the most powerful antibiotics, so that if you want to live, you have to have it amputated. [Sigh!]
On the whole, post-amputation, I’ve had a pretty good experience: as the docs told me, I’ve felt better than if I’d tried to keep the foot by staying on those obscenely powerful med’s. And ever since that runner Pistorius murdered his girlfriend, I haven’t even had to explain the prosthesis that serves as the end of my right leg; network news sensationalism did that job for me. Once in a while, in summer, I get a notion that I wouldn’t sweat so profusely if I didn’t have to wear a rubber liner over my stump…
I’m with kryten, I love morphine.
in fact, morphine and alcohol are really the only two drugs that ever do anything for me… you can keep your pot farms, I am sooooo looking forward to morphine-laced beer becoming available to home brewers.