Opium poppy harvesting tools

The average weight of raw opium collected per pod is 80 milligrams — about 15 to 20 kilograms per hectare of land. The raw opium, which does not spoil if it is stored in a cool, dry environment, is placed in a plastic bag, ready to be made into morphine base. AAlthough heroin can be smoked or snorted, the most effective and common form of consumption is to inject it.

Before an addict can inject heroin, it must be made into a solution. To dissolve the heroin, the addict mixes heroin in a large spoon with water. Lemon juice is sometimes added to help dissolve the heroin. In , opium poppy was grown in Afghanistan on an estimated area of , hectares. The annual production was expected to be 3, metric tons, down because of a bad harvest from 6, metric tons in But it has not always been this way.

Afghanistan and its opium both feature in an exhibition curated by Doris Buddenburg, one of the two authors of this dispatch. It specifically covers the cultural history of opium and how its use spread from Europe and the eastern Mediterranean to Asia.

The exhibit includes harvesting tools and smoking utensils, a statue of a Greek goddess with a poppy head as her symbol, a hall of fame of opium eaters in the colours that the drug users see, an iconic perfume bottle — and, yes, a cube of real raw opium.

Harvesting opium and its tools Harvesting opium is a labour intensive task, as it requires each poppy head or pod to be incised several times over a few days. The instruments the labourers use have to be simple, easily replaceable and cheap. The enzymes are the workers in the line that assemble the opiates, step by step.

To understand this key two-pronged step in this production line, the team made mutant poppies by soaking regular seeds in a chemical, creating random changes in its DNA. The team then selected the poppies that were bad at making opiatesand found that the impaired poppies got stuck at one specific point in the process. By studying the genes of these mutants, Graham's team was able to identify the one responsible for the buildup. And with the identification of this gene, scientists now know all the genes needed to engineer a single strain of yeast to produce opiates like morphine.

Graham predicts that within the next year, someone will be able to engineer yeast to undergo the entire process, but echoes Smolke that it will be a while before opiate production in yeast will be commercially viable.