Cacao trade as insight to future of drugs/coke?

[SpiralusSancti]

Cacao is legal and it is cause of anything from wildlife destruction to slavery and everything in between. It is a good example showing how making/leaving something legal often wont solve crime or much of problems connected to same thing and I suspect same would certainly be true for coke. If you consider cacao, coffee, tea, palm oil, ebony, bananas and many many other things and how they are connected to crime and destruction you have to understand and accept that legalising coke is not only not likely to fix crime problems with coke but might, and likely would cause additional crime and misery for many many people as coke is way more expensive to produce than cacao. Coke growth is also confined to specific climate and geography makes it a whole lot more complex because of specific countries that are in those regions.

Is solution synthetic? Either good route to make it will be find or superior but as good alternative will be found, sooner or later. Well that could/will solve much of a problem and cause how many more problems by taking bread for both common people in those regions and from international drug syndicates..neither will be happy and will adapt in ways hard to predict. Will coke prices drop to cacao prices? Will international drug syndicates just push their into legal trade as they do with, good example is, with benzos. Will superior alternative or synthetic route just get “lost” by power of money, violence and other influence?

Not sure what to think about legal coke but I know that dear Peyote would have been really thankful if procaline was made during hight of his exploitation and would gladly ride trough deserts in much bigger number today if it was like that.

Make no mistake, our planet is too small to harvest it for food and drugs for such a big population and what can be made via green chemistry should be made via green chemistry and not black and brown harvesting.

♡ better living trough green chemistry ♡

 

[plumbus-nine]

You are right about crime related to production unfortunately, eg cacao is a sad story, but there is a whole industry benefitting from illegality of coke starting with import, distribution, sale, law enforcement, DEA, private prisons, you name it. Maybe Coca generates less petty crime than eg heroin because it is mostly rich people consuming it but the amount of energy and money the DEA spends to limit coke distribution is insane and that's just one country. Read that they have undercover agents in most South American countries etc. and how many people get sentenced to prison due to the drug.

But of course this might be only the tip of the iceberg and the horrible conditions in Colombia, Peru would continue nevertheless but also legal coke would allow the implementation of fair trade analog to coffee, cocoa and banana.

♡ better living trough green chemistry ♡

Yeah, I'm absolutely in for that! But afaik most Coca analogues are pretty difficult to synthesize and would only be cost efficient if manufacturing starting with coke which would solve nothing. The only two which were available as RCs, troparil and rti-222 (not completely sure if it is the correct name, was many years ago) sucked hard.
But this is on a gray market situation where producers of RCs need high margins to compensate for losses due to seizure (and, obviously, greed). A complete legalization would certainly aid here as well.

 

[SpiralusSancti]

I would like to add that even if easy/short/good enough cocaine synth won’t ever be found or if no chemical resembling and/or suprasing positive effects of coke is found, microorganisms eating tropane alkaloids and shitting coke will be made for sure. But I’m positive even total synth will be made and even much more confident that better synthetic alternative will be found, I’m guessing by the end of century for sure.

 

[Neuroborean]

End of the century??

Scientists Figure Out How To Synthesize A Load Of Cocaine From Tobacco

Researchers finally provide a blow-by-blow account of the biosynthesis of cocaine.

www.iflscience.com

 

[plumbus-nine]

End of the century??

Legally available, this will take a longer time than to develop a synthesis unfortunately. Drug illegality is baked into society so deeply since Nixon started the war on drugs decades ago.

But even better would be a compound which shares cocaines activity at monoamine transporters but doesn't have local anesthetic properties. Goodbye rotten nose and cardiotoxicity.

 

[Neuroborean]

Legally available, this will take a longer time than to develop a synthesis unfortunately. Drug illegality is baked into society so deeply since Nixon started the war on drugs decades ago.

But even better would be a compound which shares cocaines activity at monoamine transporters but doesn't have local anesthetic properties. Goodbye rotten nose and cardiotoxicity.

I don't know..
I like NEP very much, I know that some people think it's crap and not comparable, but I'm pretty sure a better molecule than coke already exists, but people don't sell it yet (as a RC).