Will the Ability to Make Cocaine and Heroin in the Lab and at Home Increase Drug Abuse?

The World Health Organization estimates that, world-wide, 16 million people use cocaine, heroin, and other opioids illegally (although these numbers may underestimate opioid abuse in the United States). If these kinds of biosynthetic yeasts became widely available they would transform the illegal drug market. It is vastly easier to make drugs with yeasts in a jar than it is to smuggle cocaine from South America.

Tailor-Made for Criminal Activity

Brewing illegal opiate drugs would be much harder to detect than making methamphetamine in a lab or nurturing marijuana plants under grow lights. Brewing illegal opiate drugs would also be a lot cheaper than smuggling cocaine or growing illegal marijuana. There is no need for expensive, explosive, toxic chemicals in the production process. The only raw materials needed are water and sugar. There is no need to cross international borders. The equipment to raise opioid-producing yeast might be as simple as a jar with a lid. Just about anyone, when the technology is worked out, might be able to do this without a knowledge of chemistry or connections in illegal trade.

Policy analysts Kenneth Oye, Tania Bubela, and J. Chappell H. Lawson predict that the technology for home-brewed morphine is imminent or may even already be here. The technology for making heroin would come very quickly; because cocaine involves a different enzyme process it may be farther away.

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A liter of of home brew might produce 10 grams of morphine. It might be necessary to drink as little as one or two milliliters (a little more than 1/4 of a teaspoon) of the liquid to get a standard dose of the drug. A quart of the liquid might yield 500 to 1000 hits. Even if the street price of illegal drugs is greatly reduced to say, $5 for the equivalent of a bag of heroin, that's still $5000 to $10,000 for growing some yeast in a jar. Oye, Bubela, and Lawson urge governments to control opioid-producing yeasts now before they fall into the hands of criminal elements.

Will the Ability to Make Opioid Drugs from Yeast Increase Drug Abuse?

It's not a foregone conclusion, however, that the ability to make opioid drugs from yeasts will result in massive increases in drug abuse. In Europe, where the war on drugs largely failed, street drugs like heroin have become extremely cheap. This hasn't resulted in massive increases in drug addiction. As David Nutt of Imperial College London, a former drug policy adviser to the UK government, was quoted in New Scientist, “People don’t take them because most of them are not stupid.”

Similarly, the ability to make drugs at home won't make crime go away. It might put poppy growers in Afghanistan and cocaine makers in Colombia out of business, but the crime syndicates have already found other activities for making money. Like every other technology, home-brewed opioid drugs hold the potential for good or evil. We must control technology rather than allowing technology to control us.