Field poppy

According to historical records, around 1500 B.c. the use of opium, as well as its exportation, was beginning to take root. The city of Thebes was so well-known for its poppy fields that it lent its name to the active alkaloid in opium, thebaine. Alkaloids are any of a host of organic compounds, often complex in structure, derived from plants. Many [alkaloids] are useful as medicines and poisons. In medical texts left by the Egyptians, there are more than 700 medicines that contain opium. Under the... 

Figure 1.1 Poppy field. Richard Cummins/CORBIS.

In 2006, a total of 15,300 hectares of opium poppy fields were eradicated by Afghan authorities. This is roughly 8 per cent of the area under opium poppy cultivation, up from 5 per cent in 2005. Overall, two thirds of cultivated opium poppy in each village was left standing after the eradication teams had carried out their activities. 

In some developing countries, particularly around the poppy fields themselves, opium is used for its medicinal and recreational effects. Opium smoking and/or eating is still a problem in rural areas where the poppies are cultivated. By some estimates, perhaps as much as 25% of the opium produced in Southeast Asia is consumed by opium poppy farmers. 

First of all, peasants of the Golden Triangle poppy fields do not appreciate secret accounts in the Bahamas. Furthermore, since the end of the Vietnam War, and the end of the widespread traffic in contraband and American arms and American dollars, the U.S. dollar in the form of currency is no longer an acceptable... 

Opium comes from Papaver somniferum, one of the many species of the poppy plant. The opium poppy is native to the Middle East in die areas that border the Mediterranean Sea, but it is now cultivated extensively throughout Asia and the Middle East. Contrary to the experiences of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, however, simply walking tiirough a poppy field will not cause sleep or euphoria. Rather, special procedures must be followed to extract opium from the poppy. The petals fall after the poppy blooms, leaving a round seed pod the size of an egg. If the seed pod is scored lightly with a knife, it secretes a... 

Common Names Corn Poppy, Field Poppy, Shirley Poppy Poison Opium Dosage . 2oz(5G) Sap... 

Paradoxically—yet sensibly, by all means—vast narcoterrorism cultivars were eliminated by agroterrorism-like warfare launched in the last decade, including the effective use of specific fungi capable of destroying poppy fields in Uzbekistan and coca fields in Columbia. 

In the 2006 budget request, over half of the INCLE funds were devoted to Afghanistan, mainly for eradication of poppy fields. 

Nowadays, around 200 species of the poppy genus (Latin, Papaver) are known. The poppy is found across almost the whole land area of the Earth, initially excepting South America. During the First World War, the American Mafia feared being cut off from supplies of the raw material by the intensified war at sea, and therefore had poppy fields planted, first in Mexico and later in Colombia. 

The significance of the contraction in opium cultivation in Myanmar and Laos cannot be overstated. Although opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan increased massively in 2006, the global area under illicit poppy cultivation was still 10 per cent lower in 2006 than in 2000, due to reduction in South-East Asia. But despite the reduction in the area under cultivation, potential heroin production is up, because Afghan fields are more productive than fields in South-East Asia. In 2006, global opium production soared to a new record high of 6,610 mt, a 43 per cent increase over 2005. 

UNODC has also started to conduct yield surveys in some countries, measuring the yield of test fields, and to develop methodologies to extrapolate the yields from proxy variables, such as the volume of poppy capsules or the number of plants per plot. This approach is used in South-East Asia as well as in Afghanistan. All of this is intended to improve yield estimates, aiming at information that is independent from farmers reports. The accuracy of the calculated yields depends on a number of factors, including the number of sites investigated. In the case of Afghanistan the confidence interval for the mean yield results in the 2006 survey was, for instance, +/- 3% of the mean value (tt= 0.1). 

Bill Clinton, though, shifted the emphasis somewhat away from enforcement. As implemented today, the struggle against drug abuse and drug trafficking has many levels or aspects. It stretches from the street corner to the courthouse, from the border inspection post to fields of coca in Bolivia or of opium poppies in Afghanistan. 

The seeds of the opium poppy are sown in October in well-cultivated soil. The seeds germinate in the fall, and the seedlings may be an inch high when snow falls this protects them from freezing. In the spring, when the plants have attained the height of 6 in., the fields are cultivated and the plants thinned to stand about 2 ft apart. The poppy blossoms in April or May, and the capsules mature in June or July. Each plant bears from five to eight capsules. 

In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions collapsed in sleep in a field of poppies. This scene is not realistic, however. Simply walking in a field of poppies will not put you into a drugged sleep. 

The validity of these theoretically determined cutoff levels was evaluated by the various field studies described below. In some of these this involved comparing the results of hair analysis to those of urinalysis and self-reports. In the case of cocaine and morphine the validation of endogenous cutoff levels involved also the controlled administration of these substances. - With morphine this was done with poppy seed and involved a comparison of hair and urine results. These experiments clearly demonstrated the greater effectiveness of the endogenous cutoff levels used by hair analysis, for all attempts to exceed the opiate cutoff level of hair analysis by the massive ingestion of poppy seeds failed. In contrast to this, the cutoff level of urinalysis was exceeded by wide margins. That this particular problem of urinalysis is not unique to poppy seeds has been demonstrated experimentally by Baselt and Change in the case of cocaine. 

Heroin can be encountered in the form of powder samples and as residues on the paraphernalia used for its administration and on the equipment involved in its mixing, cutting and distribution. Heroin is the mixture of products formed when morphine is extracted from the dried latex of the field poppy, purified (often incompletely) and then subsequently acetylated to form diamorphine, the target drug. 

Although the development of trace analysis is considered to have begun with studies related to the determination of trace elements, from the pharmaceutical point of view, the beginning of this field of science should be sought in the analysis of dmgs and especially in the search for active compounds in different t3 pes of pharmaceutical decoctions, tinctures, and macerations. Isolation of opium and later morphine from poppy juice, or isolation of quinine from cinchona tree bark, were nothing other than preparation and concentration of a sample before performing trace analysis [1-3]. 

POPPY OF THE PHILOSOPHERS — The Stone when perfect at the Red Stage so called because it has the vivid colour of this field flower. 

Opium poppy Papaver somniferum L., Papaveraceae) is one of the most important medicinal plants and has been cultivated since early centuries. Opium, the dried cytoplasm of a specialized internal secretory system called the laticifer, is normally collected from the unripe capsule. It is the source for the commercial production of medicinally important alkaloids, morphine, codeine, thebaine, noscapine and papaverine [130, 131], Fig. (61). Morphine, which has strong addictive property, is still the most effective analgesic for the treatment of mortal cancer patients in modem medicine. Codeine is commonly used as an antitussive. However, field cultivation of this plant has been limited since 1953 by the United Nations Opium Conference Protocol to prevent narcotic crimes. Therefore, establishing tissue culture technique for the production of morphinan alkaloids seems to be desirable not only for medicinal purpose but also for decreasing abuse of opiates. 

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