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rabidz7

Opioid Plants?

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Are there any opioid-containing plants (other than Opium or Kratom)?

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I know it's not a plant but interesting all the same, apparently morphine has been found in cane toad skin.

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There are many plants and animals thats containing opioids. Even Salvinorin A in Salvia divinorum is a Opioid because it binds on the Kappa Opioid receptor. Some Psychotria species also included opioids. Not forgetting Incarvillea sinensis, Incarvillea delavayi and Picralima nitida. Much has yet to be discovered.

I have to what is written in German. Unfortunately, my English is not so good that i can translate the whole text.
Look this Link in a German Forum and translate it with google.

Edited by pan
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Wild Lettuce/Opium Lettuce perhaps?

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Lactuca virosa is not set to the opioid receptors and is therefore not an opioid.

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There are many plants and animals thats containing opioids. Even Salvinorin A in Salvia divinorum is a Opioid because it binds on the Kappa Opioid receptor. Some Psychotria species also included opioids. Not forgetting Incarvillea sinensis, Incarvillea delavayi and Picralima nitida. Much has yet to be discovered.

I have to what is written in German. Unfortunately, my English is not so good that i can translate the whole text.

Look this Link in a German Forum and translate it with google.

Thanks for the thread. I managed to translate it, thank's again. Edited by theuserformallyknownasd00d
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Didn't someone find oxycodone in epipactis helleborine several years ago?

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From Psychotria colorata ranges a big leaf for a 2.5 hour long experience.
In Picralima nitida the fun at 250 mg begins. A seed has usually 800 mg. Effect up 3 h.

Edited by pan
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From Psychotria colorata ranges a big leaf for a 2.5 hour long experience.

In Picralima nitida the fun at 250 mg begins. A seed has usually 800 mg. Effect up 3 h.

Nice. What was the route of administration for these? Oral dose? Chewed or brewed? Smoked? etc

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Yes, Oral dose, Chewed.

May I ask if this was from a plant you grew, or did you purchase the leaf from a supplier?

Pls ignore if this question is legally problematic to answer.

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interesting the crushed seed was/is being used as an effective painkiller :wink:

EDIT - .....Standardised in pills by hospital staff.....

Edited by waterboy 2.0

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For a better imagine. Pictures from some of my Psychotria colorata. A really powerful shamanic plant.

Young Plant.

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Leaves are easy to take root as with all Psychotria.

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Rooted Plants.

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Old Leaf.

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Dry Picralima nitida (Akuamma) Seeds

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Edited by pan
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Great pictures- thanks pan! And ta for the link and to dood too for the RTFM/ translation tip ( I hadn't, I did, it was worth it )

Would you differentiate those from P.viridis and P. carth plants of the same age?

I have seen pics of P. colorata where the leaves are a much darker green, but that could be variations in growing conditions/ computer screen colour matching etc.

Would love to see some pics when it flowers

Nice writeup on an interesting species- thank you

Edited by Darklight
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Psychotria colorata, an old plant.

I think you can see the differences to P. viridis and P. alba (syn. carthagenensis). Old leaves have more pronounced ribs than the other two species and have larger leaves than Psychotria alba.

.

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Edited by pan
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Is Picralima Nitada in circulation in Australia? Had an eye out for this for some time but haven't happened across it yet

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On the Tramadol front...lol....imagine living in a place polluted with the stuff.

 

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Weirdly, Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

Last year I mentioned a paper that described the well-known drug tramadol as a natural product, isolated from a species of tree in Cameroon. Rather high concentrations were found in the root bark, and the evidence looked solid that the compound was indeed being made biochemically.
Well, thanks to chem-blogger Quintus (and a mention on Twitter by See Arr Oh), I’ve learned that this story has taken a very surprising turn. This new paper in Ang. Chem. investigates the situation more closely. And you can indeed extract tramadol from the stated species – there’s no doubt about it. You can extract three of its major metabolites, too – its three major mammalian metabolites. That’s because, as it turns out, tramadol is given extensively to cattle (!) in the region, so much of it that the parent drug and its metabolites have soaked into the soil enough for the African peach/pincushion tree to have taken it up into its roots. I didn’t see that one coming.
The farmers apparently take the drug themselves, at pretty high dosages, saying that it allows them to work without getting tiree. Who decided it would be a good thing to feed to the cows, no one knows, but the farmers feel that it benefits them, too. So in that specific region in the north of Cameroon, tramadol contamination in the farming areas has built up to the point that you can extract the stuff from tree roots. Good grief. In southern Cameroon, the concentrations are orders of magnitude lower, and neither the farmers nor the cattle have adopted the tramadol-soaked lifestyle. Natural products chemistry is getting trickier all the time.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/09/15/weirdly_tramadol_is_not_a_natural_product_after_all

 

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The Tramadol Wars

You may recall the report of the synthetic analgesic tramadol as a natural product from Cameroon, and the subsequent report that it was nothing of the kind. (That’s the paper that brought the surprising news that local farmers were feeding the drug to their cows). Now the first group (a team from Nantes, Lodz, and Grenoble) is back with a rebuttal.
They note that previous report, but also say that tramadol has been isolated from samples in a bioreserve, where human cattle grazing is prohibited. The rest of the paper goes on to analyze isolated tramadol samples by NMR, looking for variations in the 13C levels to try to come up with a biosynthetic pathway. Isotopic distribution is the way to do that, for sure – the various synthetic steps used to make a compound (and its precursors) can be subject to kinetic isotope effects, and over time, these can build up to recognizable signatures. An example of this is the identification of endogenous human testosterone versus the plant-derived material found in supplements.
The authors go over how the various structural features found in tramadol have also been noted in other natural products, and propose some biosynthetic pathways based on these and on the observed 13C ratios (which they report do vary from synthetic samples). Probably the strongest evidence is from the methyl groups, which show evidence of having been delivered by something like S-adenosylmethionine. Overall oxygen isotope ratios are also apparently quite different than commercial samples.
So the battle is joined! The confounding factors I can think of, off the top of my head, are possible differences in the synthetic routes (and thus isotope ratios) of the commercial material used here (from Sigma-Aldrich) and the material available in Cameroon. But then, the authors state here that their samples were obtained from a part of the nature reserve where people are not farming cattle. None of us are exactly in a position to judge that – I’m not going to the boonies of Cameroon to find out – but if they’re right about that, it’s also a good argument in their favor.
But the only way to really resolve this is to grow some African peach trees, feed them labeled precursors, and see if strongly labeled tramadol comes out the other end. This paper says that such an experiment is “not currently feasible”, but I have to wonder if there’s an arboretum somewhere that has such trees in it (and if such trees produce tramadol already). There will surely be another chapter to this story – or two, or three.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/06/25/the_tramadol_wars

 

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The Case For Non-Biogenic Tramadol

The battle over whether tramadol is a natural product or not has been a heated one. Over the last couple of years, it was reported to be produced by a west African shrub, then this was reported to be an artifact of feeding the drug to cattle, and then this hypothesis was challenged by work on an actual biosynthetic pathway. The latest cannonball to be fired might end the debate, although I’m not sure I’d bet on that just yet. It’s from the Dortmund group that reported the tramadol contamination problem, and they’ve returned to the area of North Cameroon (with a colleage from the University of Mourou there) to analyze the material using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS).

The idea is to measure the amount of carbon-14 in the tramadol itself. Natural products get their carbon, fundamentally, from carbon dioxide in the environment, fixed by photosynthetic organisms into material for the food chain. As such, there should always be some radioactive carbon in there, since it’s being continually produced in the upper atmosphere from nitrogen atoms interacting with cosmic rays. This is the whole idea behind carbon dating – a continual source of 14C. Synthetic organic compounds, though, tend to be made from precursors that are ultimately derived from petroleum/natural gas feedstocks. These have been sitting underground for an extended period, not exchanging very much carbon with the surrounding environment, and are thus depleted in carbon-14. You need some pretty hard-core analysis to detect this sort of thing (thus AMS), but the differences are large once you can see them. (As an aside, the various people who are convinced that a “natural” compound is just somehow different than the identical molecule prepared by synthetic routes may not realize that yes, in some cases the all-natural one is slightly more radioactive).

The authors grew the plant in question (Sarcocephalus latifolius) from seed and confirmed that (1) it had no tramadol in its leaves or roots as grown, (2) that when fed with labeled phenylalanine (the starting material for the previously proposed biosynthetic pathway), that this was taken up and converted to various intermediates, but not to any detectable tramadol, and (3) that when plants were grown in tramadol-laced soil, that they did indeed take up the compound into various tissues.

There are many field observations in the paper as well. Tramadol, as purchased from a street vendor in Cameroon, has (as expected) very low 14C content, consistent with it being a compound derived (ultimately) from petroleum sources. Various locations around northern Cameroon were found to have tramadol in the soil, rivers, and drinking water (!), and all of these samples also showed the same low levels of 14C. Sampling the plants in these regions gave highly variable results. Many of them had no detectable tramadol at all, but the amounts found in them (and in soil samples) seemed to correlate well with collection during the rainy season, which also suggests anthropogenic contamination. In short, the whole area is laced with synthetic tramadol in various concentrations, some of them rather alarmingly high – the drug is clearly a persistent contaminant in the environment, and this really does seem to be the source of it in plant samples.

So unless someone can demonstrate tramadol with higher radiocarbon content, or (especially) show that it is produced in plants grown under controlled conditions, this case would seem to be closed. We’ll see if it really is, though. . .

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/10/19/the-case-for-non-biogenic-tramadol

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