Opium is a black sticky tar. The "latex" or "sap" that can be harvested from certain species of Poppy plants.
It contains over a dozen drugs.
To name a few:
-Morphine
-Codeine
-Thebaine
-Papaverine
By making a few slight scrapes around the mature seed pod, the white latex will beging to drain.
In a few hours it will have dried into a black tar. That is the unrefined opium.
This process is typically repeated several times.
In countries such as Iran, Holland, Romania, and many others, large amounts are harvested for medical purposes.
In many other cases it is used for the purpose of creating the illegal substance heroin in mass quantity.
As they say in the hills of Thailand/Burma, "Anybody who smokes more than three pipes of opium a day is an addict."
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