Hello everybody!
I have a few questions after finding out that a friend of mine stumbled onto some old Laudanum so I was hoping people can shed some light on this for me primarily to inform me for harm reduction as I don't want to see him OD, get sick, get hurt or die. I figure if I can inform him of possible interactions, side effects, horror stories or other reasons why he should be careful or not do it I might get through better than if I just told him it wasn't a good idea.
The story goes like this, This friend of mine is in the Antiques appraisal & auction industry so I always hear stories about the interesting old things they come across. I don't know how they find some of the things they do because it seems like he's always talking about something I've never seen or heard of and usually it's fairly high $$ items. Anyways he calls me up on Thursday night and says " your never going to believe what I found ", I didn't think much of it and said "oh yah what's that" then he says they bought a complete old estate that was in the same family since the later 1800's and after going through some of the stuff he was cleaning out an old roll top desk and came across an old sealed paper box containing a sealed glass bottle stuck behind one of the pull out drawers. The label on the box and glass bottle says PURE Medicinal Laudanum, its about 3/4 full of a black substance but has never been opened. I did a little reasearch and it seems to me this was mixed with some kind of alcohol solution and I'm sure the alcohol evaporated leaving the remainder in the bottle. He was talking about it and said maybe it's like vintage wine and said it's prob ok to experiment with. Now I've had very old wine before from the 1920's & 30's with no problems but I didn't know what to tell him about this. He's going on the idea that it's a sealed bottle, was always inside and looks fine, from what I was reading there's alkaloids in there and I have no idea how long those are stable. He was saying he might open the bottle and add alcohol or warm water to it to make it a thin solution again. As I said I didn't really know what to tell him so I didn't say much as I didn't want to look at me as a "buzz kill" (no pun intended) and get the idea that he can't be honest with me about things but when I started to think about it i started to worry more. What kind of info, knowledge or support on this can you all give me, anything and everything is appreciated.
Thank You very much!
I have a few questions after finding out that a friend of mine stumbled onto some old Laudanum so I was hoping people can shed some light on this for me primarily to inform me for harm reduction as I don't want to see him OD, get sick, get hurt or die. I figure if I can inform him of possible interactions, side effects, horror stories or other reasons why he should be careful or not do it I might get through better than if I just told him it wasn't a good idea.
The story goes like this, This friend of mine is in the Antiques appraisal & auction industry so I always hear stories about the interesting old things they come across. I don't know how they find some of the things they do because it seems like he's always talking about something I've never seen or heard of and usually it's fairly high $$ items. Anyways he calls me up on Thursday night and says " your never going to believe what I found ", I didn't think much of it and said "oh yah what's that" then he says they bought a complete old estate that was in the same family since the later 1800's and after going through some of the stuff he was cleaning out an old roll top desk and came across an old sealed paper box containing a sealed glass bottle stuck behind one of the pull out drawers. The label on the box and glass bottle says PURE Medicinal Laudanum, its about 3/4 full of a black substance but has never been opened. I did a little reasearch and it seems to me this was mixed with some kind of alcohol solution and I'm sure the alcohol evaporated leaving the remainder in the bottle. He was talking about it and said maybe it's like vintage wine and said it's prob ok to experiment with. Now I've had very old wine before from the 1920's & 30's with no problems but I didn't know what to tell him about this. He's going on the idea that it's a sealed bottle, was always inside and looks fine, from what I was reading there's alkaloids in there and I have no idea how long those are stable. He was saying he might open the bottle and add alcohol or warm water to it to make it a thin solution again. As I said I didn't really know what to tell him so I didn't say much as I didn't want to look at me as a "buzz kill" (no pun intended) and get the idea that he can't be honest with me about things but when I started to think about it i started to worry more. What kind of info, knowledge or support on this can you all give me, anything and everything is appreciated.
Thank You very much!