MORPHINE FROM POPPY STRAWS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 295, 10 November 1934, Page 10

MORPHINE FROM POPPY STRAWS.

LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND NEW PROCESS.

The Lancet states that the Advisory Committee of the League of Nations recently became aware of a new process for extracting morphine .and other alkaloids from poppy straw and poppy chaff remaining after the ripe capsules have been thrashed to separate the seeds. These parts of the plants have hitherto been regarded as useless and have been destroyed or utilised as a poor quality of manure. The process is regarded as a new source of income for agriculture, and owing to the ease with which stocks of the raw material can ho accumulated, transported, and stored the manufacture can bo uninterruptedly carried on throughout the year. There are at the present time some SOOO rhectares of land in Hungary under poppy cultivation, yielding some 13,000 tons of poppy straw annually. One ton of poppy straw can be made to yield 800 grammes of morphine base and 80 grammes of codeine base, thus some 10,000 kilos of morphine and 1000 kilos of codeine could be annually produced. “The quality of the alkaloids is pronounced to be the same as that obtained from raw opium and to meet pharmacopoeial requirements. The effect ol this new discovery on tho . supply of morphine for licit, and also illicit, purposes is likely to complicate still further the international control of drugs of addiction. “The Hungarian Government and the inventor of the process are prepared to enter into arrangements both with private undertakings and with the Governments for the sale of the secret of the new process, to foreign producers under certain conditions. All this makes it important to expedite the summoning by the League of Nations of the projected conference on the production of the raw materials of dangerous drugs.”