China opiates

In opiate abuse, smack ( junk, jazz, stuff, China white mostly heroin) is self administered by injection ( mainUning ) so as to avoid first-pass metabolism and to achieve a faster rise in brain concentration. Evidently, psychic effects ( kick, buzz, rush ) are especially intense with this route of administration. The user may also resort to other more unusual routes opium can be smoked, and heroin can be taken as snuff (B). 

Opiate trafficking levels from South-East Asia to North America and Europe, as well as from Latin America to Europe, remained low. As of 2005/06, however, Afghan-produced opiates were trafficked to China in increasing amounts. 

In 2005, Iran made the world s largest opiate (heroin, morphine and opium in heroin equivalents) seizures (29 %), followed by Pakistan (20%), Afghanistan (15 %), China (7.5%), Turkey (7%), the Russian Federation (4%) and Tajikistan (2%). The UK4 accounted for 1.8 per cent, the USA 1.4 per cent and Italy 1.1 per cent of global opiates seizures. 

Annual prevalence in China (2004) is estimated to be less than 0.2 per cent or 1.7 million people. The number of officially registered active drug users in China was 785,000 in 2005 of which 700,000 (or 78%) were heroin users, 2.28 per cent were opium users and 0.19 per cent were morphine users. The Chinese opiates market is reported to have stabilized in 2005/06.3... 

The nepenthe (Gk "free from sorrow") mentioned in the Odyssey probably contained opium. Opium smoking was widely practiced in China and the Near East until recently. Isolation of active opium alkaloids and the introduction of the hypodermic needle, allowing parenteral use of morphine, increased opioid use in the West. The first of several "epidemics" of opioid use in the USA followed the Civil War. About 4% of adults in the USA used opiates regularly during the postbellum period. By the 1900s, the number had dropped to about 1 in 400 people in the USA, but the problem was still considered serious enough to justify passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act just before World War I. A new epidemic of opioid use started around 1964 and has continued unabated ever since. While fear of AIDS has reduced intravenous use of heroin, recent increases in its purity have led to markedly increased intranasal use. Present estimates are that the number of opioid-dependent people in the USA has stabilized at around 750,000. 

When the Communists came into power in 1949 in China, they imposed the death penalty on anyone producing or consuming opiates. Users were sentenced to long terms, which included building a road toward Siberia. This was, in effect, a death penalty. Their success and continuing interest in purging addiction from their society has removed China as a major source of narcotics."... 

The opiates are perhaps the oldest drugs known to man. The use of opium was recorded in China over two thousand years ago and was known in Mesopotamia before that. Over the centuries the crude extract derived from poppies has been widely used as a sedative. A tincture of opium called laudanum was introduced to England and was considered indispensable to medicine. It is ironic that a compound renowned for its sedative effects should have led to at least one war. In the nineteenth century, the Chinese authorities became so alarmed about the addictive properties of opium that they tried to ban all production of it. This was contrary to the interests of the British traders dealing in opium and as a result the British sent in the gunboats to reverse the... 

Geographic Distribution of Heroin Abuse. Although opiate abuse originated In China and Southeast Asia It has first of all spread to the major... 

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