Natural drugs refined forms

Historically, natural products have formed the oldest basis for new medicines, and natural selection during evolution and competition between the species has produced powerful, biologically active natural products. These can serve as chemical leads, to be refined by the chemist by creating analogues that will provide a more specifically acting drug, or perhaps avoid a delivery problem or an unwanted adverse side effect. 

The relationships people form with plants are different from those they form with white powders. Crude natural drugs tend to he less toxic, and users tend to stay in better relationships with them over time. One reason for this difference is that plants are dilute preparations, since the active principles are combined not only with other drugs but also with inert vegetable matter. Drugs plants commonly contain less than 5 percent of an active princi-pic. (Coca rarely has more than 0.5 percent cocaine. By contrast, refined preparations may approach 100 percent purity. 

Morphine, cocaine, and mescaline are all examples of drugs that occur in plants but are commonly available in refined form as white powders, sold both legally and illegally. Some of them, such as mescaline, can easily be synthesized in laboratories, but even when they are, we can still call them natural drugs because the molecules already exist in nature. Others, such as cocaine and morphine, have more complex molecular structures. Chemists can make them in laboratories, but it is not cost efficient to do so. All the cocaine and morphine on the black market and in pharmacies arc extracted from coca leaves and opium poppies. 

Pharmacologists often take refined natural drugs and change their chemical structures to vary their properties. A very simple change is to combine an insoluble drug from a plant with an acid to make a water-soluble salt. In this way the "freebase" form of cocaine, which is usually smoked because it will not dissolve, is turned into cocaine hydrochloride, a water-soluble compound that can be inhaled or injected. 

Coca and cocaine are very different, and the difference shows how it is easier to form good relationships with natural drugs than with isolated and refined ones. 

Take dilute forms of stimulants rather than concentrated ones. The more dilute the preparation of a stimulant, the easier it is for the body to adjust to it, and the more gentle the letdown at the end. Preparations of plants such as coffee and tea are naturally more dilute than refined or synthetic drugs, and are easier to stay in good relationships with. 

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