Which plants extract/latex is used to prepare a narcotics called Heroin ?

Question

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Correct — option (1), 'Poppy plant'. Heroin comes from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. The unripe seed capsule of the plant is scored with a blade and exudes a milky latex, which dries into the brown gum called opium; that latex is the source of the whole family of opiates. Morphine is the principal alkaloid extracted from it, and heroin is not itself a plant product but a semi-synthetic derivative — diacetylmorphine, made by acetylating morphine — which is why the question asks for the plant whose latex is used to prepare heroin rather than the plant that contains it. The same latex yields codeine, thebaine, papaverine and noscapine, which is why the poppy remains a licensed medicinal crop even though its derivatives are among the most tightly controlled substances in the world. In India the plant is grown only under licence issued by the Central Bureau of Narcotics, and the narcotic drugs derived from it are regulated by the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985. Heroin is the drug commonly called smack or brown sugar in Indian usage, and its street forms are crude acetylated preparations of opium rather than pharmaceutical-grade material.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The coca plant, Erythroxylum coca, is the source of cocaine, which is obtained from its leaves rather than from any latex. Cocaine and heroin are opposite in their pharmacological effect as well as in their origin — cocaine is a stimulant of the central nervous system, heroin a depressant — so the two are never interchangeable in an examination answer. This is the most attractive of the wrong options because both plants are famous as sources of illegal drugs, and a candidate who has learnt the pair of names without attaching each to its drug will guess between them.  (c) The hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, yields the cannabis group of drugs — the dried leaves and flowering shoots as ganja or marijuana, the resin as charas or hashish — and not heroin. Cannabis products are obtained from the resin and the vegetative parts of the plant, and their active principle is a cannabinoid, chemically unrelated to the opiate alkaloids of the poppy. A candidate who reaches for hemp is usually recalling that it is the other classical Indian narcotic plant named in the law, but the NDPS Act itself keeps cannabis and opium in separate definitions precisely because they are different substances from different plants.  (d) Bajra is pearl millet, a coarse cereal grown as a rainfed food and fodder crop across the drier parts of Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat. It is not a narcotic plant at all, produces no latex, and appears here only as the obviously wrong choice that a question of this kind usually carries. Options like this one are worth noticing in a timed paper: recognising immediately that one choice is a food grain reduces a four-way question to a three-way one before any pharmacology is recalled.

Concept: Narcotic and psychotropic substances of plant origin fall into a small number of families, and each family should be held with its plant, the part of the plant used, and the drugs derived from it. The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, gives the latex of the unripe capsule, from which opium and then the alkaloids morphine, codeine, thebaine, papaverine and noscapine are obtained; heroin is made from morphine by acetylation and is therefore a semi-synthetic opiate rather than a natural product. The coca shrub, Erythroxylum coca, gives cocaine from its leaves and is a stimulant. Cannabis sativa gives ganja from the flowering tops, charas from the resin and bhang from the leaves, and its active principles are cannabinoids. Keeping the three families apart matters because the questions almost always test the pairing rather than the chemistry: which plant, which part, which drug, which effect on the nervous system.

State PCS 2024 Q62 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q62 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer