Quote from: FarmerBob on September 27, 2012, 05:11 amnext thing you know somebody will be saying the US air force controls the weather, or that the space age came about from alien technology.I'm not saying it was aliens. But it was aliens. :PQuote from: FarmerBob on September 27, 2012, 05:11 am3 - nobody is controlling morphine supplies, any idiot can grow poppy, make opium, extract morphine, and (if they have acetic anhydride) make heroin. But it takes a LOT of poppy pods and is labor intensive on non-industrial scales. That sort of work is best left to poor people, not europeans & americans unless they're doing multi acre plots and harvesting with machinery. A better alternative is synthetic or semi-synthetic opioids derived from thebaine. Big Pharma has thebaine poppy producing farms all over the world and is using that to make a lot of the modern painkillers. And painbow is quite correct that govt/pharma/AMA is working hard to reduce access and lower addiction rates.Just one year after the Afghan invasion the charts showing poppy production in Afghanistan illustrate what appears to be a 10,000% + increase in production in terms of arable land cultivated for the poppy and it is said by the narcotics interdiction control people that there was a 17,000% production increase in the amount of heroin produced in that year.But, no. Pine is clearly a crazy conspiracy theorist because there is no way that the American government would try to control poppy agronomy and therefore its principal product: morphine.I find it funny that when production is down, it's reported as about "preventing heroin supply" and when product goes way up, it's about "stabilizing the Afghan economy to prevent terrorists getting up to their old tricks". Whatever sounds sweet to the listener.It's an hilarious argument given that the Taliban cut poppy production by 95% the year before the Americans invaded.The idea that nobody is controlling morphine supply is simply flying in the face of the numbers and their distribution. The UN states that there is a severe morphine shortage in the developing world for some time now, only 6% of the morphine makes its way to 80% of the population. It's not as if they don't have the money, I mean these are some of the producer countries and their neighbors we're talking about, for them it should essentially be at rock bottom prices. Yet it is not, which is probably because they don't control it.