5 replies to this topic

[JanSteen]

An article titled 'Discovery and Engineering of the cocaine biosynthetic pathway' has been published in the Journal of the american chemical society.

 

Link: https://pubs.acs.org...21/jacs.2c09091

 

For the people not at home in bioscience, I'll write down my take:

DAMN.

 

In essence, it boils down to: Scientists have found the way to make any plant produce cocaine precursor. To make yeast do it too.

This means that production is no longer limited to the tropical regions in the world.

This means that cartels are going to lose their source of income.

This means that, if done right, production and transportation costs are going to drop to nearly zero.

 

There's a storm coming.

[shiftingshadows]

maybe, there are many other factors...

[JanSteen]

There absolutely are other factors.

But the key take away is that this is now public information, meaning that anyone with 50K USD to spend and a couple days training in biochem (and about 3 weeks in lab work) can - in essence - engineer this into yeast themselves. The primers to clone the DNA code for the active compounds and their precursors is public now.

The limiting factor right now seems to be the fact that it's rather difficult to make one single organism do the entire cascade if it's not a plant.

Luckily there's duckweed, easy to grow and a new staple crop with plenty of engineering literature out there.

 

I'm willing to bet that it's going to take less than two years before it's out there and functional.

[DocOct]

The cartels are making money off of synthetic drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine which are hyperaddictive and can basically be cut into any other counterfeit drug such as bootleg xanex and bootleg ambien. You cant even find ecstacy without it being cut with meth where im at, people literally press meth into pills and try to pass it off as x pills.

Cocaine production is allready limited and difficult due to the crackdown coming from local communities, where as importing massive quantities of precursers for methamphetimine and fentanyl from china is much easier. Hell they basically just ship the fentanyl in straight, its basic asymetrical warfair on chinas behalf.

Cocaine is barely a whisper in america right now the only time you hear about cocaine is from crack Cocaine, but all the crack heads are switching to meth because its cheaper and more effective, be high for 30 minutes or be high for 30 hours the choice is easy.

This will only cause the cartels to switch to much more powerful and destructive compounds. Its not gonna make one bit of a difference. The cartel members of the last two decades were commiting absolute atrocities while coked out of there minds, imagine what they will be willing to do on meth and other synthetic drugs.

We are way past cocaine at this point.

[JanSteen]

You might be done with it in the US. But here in Europe, there's no market for amphetamines and fentanyl. Cocaine is still imported by the tonnes.

[TVCasualty]

Cocaine is barely a whisper in america right now the only time you hear about cocaine is from crack Cocaine, but all the crack heads are switching to meth because its cheaper and more effective, be high for 30 minutes or be high for 30 hours the choice is easy.
 

 

Cocaine Bear will probably make it popular again when it's released, which is kind of disturbing when you think about it.