DID you know how easy it is to make opium? First, buy or grow some opium poppies – perfectly legal in many countries, including the UK. Next, find the recipe in a book or online. And if you’re so minded, it is fairly simple to process the opium into heroin.

None of this is difficult. And yet the masses are not consuming opiates en masse. Cannabis is even easier to grow and process, and much safer, but it is still a minority pursuit in most places.

What does this tell us? That if making morphine and cocaine becomes as easy as brewing beer (see “Home-brew heroin: soon anyone will be able to make illegal drugs“), we probably won’t see a large hike in drug use – at least among populations who are educated about the risks.

But the arrival of “home-brew drugs” will be bad news for growers and traffickers, who could find themselves outcompeted. It will also be bad for the police: it’s a lot easier to hide a microbrewery than a field of poppies or an electricity-hungry cannabis farm under the eaves.


So while the idea of home-brewed hard drugs seems risky, its social effects will probably be largely positive. With the two sides of the ineffectual”war on drugs” hobbled, civil society can get on with its gradual but inexorable progress away from knee-jerk prohibition.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Trouble brewing?”