WHERE DRUGS COME FROM.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 6 October 1924, Page 7

WHERE DRUGS COME FROM.

SCATTERED IN ALL PARTS OF THE WORLD, Few people when they go to their doctor for a tonic, or a chemist for quinine or cinnamon tablets, think where these things come 4’rom. Yet the romance of the drug industry is not without interest when we reflect that almost every country contributes something to our needs (sav s a writer in T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly). Camphor comes to us from Japan, China, and West Africa; cochineal from Mexico ; vanilla, from Mauritius and the Seychelles. From China, Persia, India, and Asia Minor we have opium. Cocaine, extracted from the leaves of the coca, shrub, reaches us from Bolivia and Peru. From the slopes of the Jura and Vosges mountains, from the Pyrenees and European Turkey we get gentian. The West Indies supply us with ginger, while Bedouins in the territories of the Upper Nile and the natives of Tinneyelli collect our senna — and send it over. Various methods are employed Unpacking drugs for exportation. Aloes from the Dptch West Indian islands usually arrive in wooden cases in which bottled spirits have been exported. Socutrine aloes from East Africa are commonly sent out in a semi-solid condition in kegs, while Zanzibar aloes are filled while soft into goat skins, which are then packed into cases. Cloves c-onie. in mats made from interlaced strips of coc-oanut leaves. Vanilla pods are bound in bundles and packed in tins. Cinnamon hark comes in carefully made cylindrical bales consisting of sticks of the same length bound together and covered, with sacking. Opium is packed in “chests’’ with the fruit of a Rumex shaken between the cakes to prevent them from sticking together. Stick liquorice is packed with bay leaves Musk pods are packed in tins, which are sometimes enclosed in silk.-covered “paddies.” Mentholl is exported in tins, oils of lemon and bemamot in various sized coppers, end otto-of-rose in metal “vases’’ covered with felt.