Znegative said:
That also makes no sense about bieng immune to iv use as opposed to vaporizing, makes no sense!
Actually it would make perfect sense with water insoluble freebase #2 heroin, commonly made in Afghanistan. An American use to tar/#4powder might conclude freebase heroin is useless or they got ripped off if they didn't add an acid to make a water soluble salt before IVing it, maybe that's why Afghan dope hasn't caught on here in the US.
Most powder H west of the Mississippi is probably cut up tar, it doesn't take much cut to make it a powder, so it can be stronger than much of the tar out there. Although, the DEA has claimed Mexico has been taking more interest in making white powder heroin, if it's made it probably only shows up in New England area where powder is expected by users.A mystery to me is how Colombian Heroin still makes up half of the heroin seized, yet it is claimed that cultivation of poppys has gone way down in Colombia. Is the UN and the DEA wrong about Colombian poppy acerage, are they getting really high yeilds from what little they do make, or are they using guerilla farming that is evading detection? Did Colombia stockpile heroin for rainy days, or could Mexican or Afghan heroin be more common in the US than is believed or publically admitted by the UN and DEA?
I wonder if Mexico always made tar, when they made powder it was almost always 30% mannitol cut before being smuggled across the border. Tar first showed up in the early 80's, purity was in the 70-high 80s%, lots of people OD on it. Mexico was knocked out of the heroin production game in the late 70s, Mexico lanched a crackdown even more extensive than the one going on today. The cartels were forced to smuggle SE Asian heroin instead, even going as far as to dye it brown so it looked the same as their product. Their also seems to have been a crackdown in southeast Asia around the time tar showed up. Afghan dope also started to appear in the 80s, in the US it was called Iranian dope because it was widely believed on the streets that it came from Iran because Iran was big on the news at that time and it was rumored that the Shah or others in his govenment were responsible for the brown #2 heroin showing up. I think the purity was much higher when sold retail, maybe the Mexicans decided to start selling black tar uncut to get back into the game when the 70s crackdown ended.
How tar is produced is also a mystery to me. I can find all kinds of stuff on how it's made in Afganistan or Burma, but almost nothing on how tar is made. I do know it's usually calculated as the hydrochloride salt on microgram, not the meconate so it isn't acetylated opium. The stuff reaks of vineger too. I wonder if the hydrochloride comes from Acetyl Chloride, making morphine hydrochloride from base beforehand(I think it smells too vinegery, so I suspect they just boil off the chemical used in the conversion and scrap up the residue) or from the Robertson-Gregory process, which involves making morphine hydrochloride from opium then making heroin from it. I think all heroin might end up as tar if it's not quenched with sodium carbonate like in afghanistan, or also decolorized with activated charcoal and crystallized in ethanol/ether like how it's done in Burma or how the French Connection did.