Illegal Drugs (II: Economist’s View)

choi

Illegal drugs | The Wars Don’t Work; As one war on drugs ends, another is starting. It will be a failure, too. Economist, May 2, 2015.
www.economist.com/news/leaders/2 ... -too-wars-dont-work

Quote:

"Marijuana has been legalised in a few places. Several countries may follow Portugal, which no longer treats use [probably not trafficking or sale] as a crime.

“When Peru drove away its coca growers, they moved to Columbia. When Columbia kicked them out, they went back to Peru. After the Caribbean cocaine-trafficking route was sealed, new, bloodier ones sprang open in Mexico, and then in Central America.

“Earlier this year China lobbied the UN’s drug-control body to place tighter restrictions on ketamine, an anaesthetic, though it failed--for now, at least. * * * The row over ketamine is an unwelcome reprise. A safe, orally administered anaesthetic, it can be used outside hospitals, even for caesarean sections and amputations. If China succeeded in tightening restrictions on the drug, poor people in countries with weak health systems will suffer and even die unnecessarily.

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) One war ends--this refers to Nixon's 1971 war on drugs. The new one "is cranking up across Asia, Russia and the Middle East. For the first, Economist names "China president" and Indonesia.

(c)
(i) ketamine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine
(Pharmacologically, ketamine is classified as an NMDA receptor antagonist; usually injected intravenously or intramuscularly [drug abuse through nose] -- bioavailability of oral ketamine hydrochloride is around 20%, [because it] is easily broken down by bile acids; Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962 by Calvin Stevens, a professor of Chemistry in Wayne State University”)
(ii) "The NMDA receptor is named this because the agonist molecule N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) binds selectively to it, and not to other glutamate receptors."

If you do not understand the quotation, it is all right. You needs to be a biologist, to comprehend.
(iii) Google itself indicates the word ketamine is a portmanteau of English nouns ketone and amine.