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Are We Ready For Synthetic Heroin?

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Many of the synthetic drugs streaming like toxic rivers through American cities have their origins in labs that weren’t trying to create addictive street drugs. But once a potent psychoactive compound emerges from a lab--intended purpose notwithstanding--its appearance on the street is only a matter of time. Knowing that, it’s concerning that researchers have just discovered how to synthetically modify yeast to create the active compounds in opioid drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin and morphine.

This is one of those science stories that’s part “wow” and part “uh oh.” On the wow side, cracking the code on lab-brewed opioids was no small effort and, despite concerns, could be called a legitimate breakthrough. As reported in Science, the research team went through extensive gene sampling from plants and animals to find the right combination needed to synthesize the drugs from a yeast-like microbe. At present only a tiny amount of the drugs can be manufactured using this method; ramping up to larger amounts will come with time as the process is improved. Quoting from the report: “This is a proof-of-principle, and major hurdles remain before optimization and scale up could be achieved.”

The discovery has a few potential upsides, high among them greater precision in the manufacturing of painkilling meds. As lead researcher Christina Smolke told NPR, "We can leverage this technology to reduce some of the narcotics' side effects, or make medications that are less addictive."

It could also enable greater production of the drugs for parts of the world where getting them for legitimate medical purposes is difficult. Our news is so saturated with stories of opiate addiction, it’s easy to forget that people suffering debilitating pain in impoverished hospitals around the world could benefit from greater availability of the drugs.

Those are the wows, but the “uh ohs” are significant. Right now more than 160,000 labs in China are pumping out synthetic drugs for buyers across the globe.  Those are in addition to the massive resources at the disposal of drug cartels that control distribution of the traditionally major street drugs like heroin and cocaine. The possibility of lab-brewing opiates is likely of interest to both of those groups. The complexity of steps from this discovery to ginning up synthetic heroin, or any number of other opiate variants en masse, is unclear.  But with the discovery of how to do it now known, the potential for exploitation is very real.

At the moment that potential is just that—potential.  Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it’s time to figure out how to regulate and manage the technology to prevent what could eventually become another synthetic drug quagmire. Quoting from the report, “Open discussions of options for governing this technology are also needed in order to responsibly realize alternative supplies for these medically relevant compounds.”

The report was published in Science.

You can find David DiSalvo on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website daviddisalvo.org.