Legal opiates heroin

There are many legal medicines that use opiates or opiate-like substances. Most of the opiate-based medicines used today are not made from natural opiates, but are either synthetic or semi-synthetic. Synthetic opiate drugs are not actually opiates at all they are merely different chemicals that act like opiates. Semi-synthetics are those drugs that involve changing the chemical structure of a natural opiate. An example of this is heroin, which is a human-made variation of morphine. Morphine and codeine are the principal natural opiates used as medicines and what follows are descriptions of the other most frequently used opiate-based medicines. 

Medical means of getting an addict off morphine allows withdrawal with less drastic symptoms. Methadone, legally administered through drug rehabilitation programs, can be substituted for morphine just as it is for heroin. A totally synthetic opioid, methadone lasts longer within the body than either morphine or heroin. Methadone closely mimics the basic opiate stmcture. 

Heroin is the most important opiate that is abused. There is no legal supply of heroin for clinical use in the U.S., however heroin is widely available on the illicit market. The purity of illicit street... 

Fig. 2 Opiate-derived agonists and antagonists for legal and illicit (i.e., heroin) use...

---