Monday, June 11, 2012

Drug Corporations Push Taliban Opium for Medical Use

Susanne Posel, Contributor

In 1998, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, discovered that noscapine could be used to combat tumors. Noscapine is derived from the opium poppy plant; the same source of heroin and the painkiller, morphine.

The drug version, called noscapine, is used as a cough suppressant in some countries. It is now being praised as a promising cancer-fighting agent.

Noscapine has been used in trial testing on animals and human cancer cells. It has proven to be effective in shrinking breast and prostate tumors; while possibly being a preventative for metastasis (the spread of tumors throughout the body).

The production of noscapine may prove difficult because of the labor-intensive methods used to extract the natural chemical. While industrial manufacturing of commercial opioids are froth with chemicals necessary to produce drugs, they are low on noscapine or are not present at all.

Since 1998, a new study by scientists at the University of York and funded by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, proves that synthetic noscapine (engineered opium) can be created by cross-breeding poppy plants and enhancing the production of noscapine by clustering together 10 genes responsible for its production.

Tim Bowser, co-author and lead researcher and developer for GlaxoSmithKline’s Australian opiates division said:


The fact that the genes are grouped in a cluster means that plant breeding becomes faster and easier. [We] are using this discovery to develop high-yielding commercial noscapine poppies in order to establish a reliable route of supply.
Australia produces large quantities of legal opioids. After negotiations in the '60s and '70s, the US government imports opium from Turkey for medical use.

The opium harvest fields in Afghanistan, controlled by the US military, are the perfect stores to obtain large amounts of poppy plants for study by drug corporations



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