Tian Win Nang squats on the hard-packed earth, balancing a kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of chocolate-coloured raw opium in each ...

Some of the strongest and most meticulously constructed sections of the book concern the two citadel-like factories in Patna and Varanasi where raw opium gum was processed into wholesale slabs of ...

That gum contains the opium alkaloids that go into making morphine, codeine and other drugs — and sometimes it contacts and contaminates the seeds. “Even though most of the opium is removed ...

Mexican cartels relied on Guatemalan farmers to grow the poppies and then turn them into opium gum. Smuggled across the border into Mexico, the cartels would transform the gum into heroin.

Investigators also seized more than 1,200 pounds of methamphetamine, 68 pounds of cocaine, as well as opium gum and heroin. The Mexican army and national guard seized some 1,196 pounds of fentanyl ...

Before the Taliban seized power in August 2021, the illicit trade in opium, a gum produced from poppies, helped pay for their insurgency. The mullahs encouraged farmers to plant poppies and taxed ...

Photograph: Claudio Vargas/Reuters Two government factories in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, and Neemuch, Madhya Pradesh, do the work yet, processing some 800 tonnes of opium gum annually to extract ...

If they could slip past the soldiers, they could sell the stiffened slime, crude opium gum, to gun-toting dealers. The rewards were great; and it was certainly easier than raising tomatoes ...

However, the poppies are also sometimes illegally planted to create opium tea or heroin, which comes from the gum of opium poppies. The NRE Tas officers returned and removed more than 50 plants ...

Mexican cartels relied on Guatemalan farmers to grow the poppies and then turn them into opium gum. Smuggled across the border into Mexico, the cartels would transform the gum into heroin.