help! study guide Q...synthetic drugs??

Some drugs come from natural sources, such as bark of trees, flowers, etc. Codeine is a derivitive of opium. In other words, you will not find codeine in any flower or plant because it is synthetically derived from some other narcotic. Now, a drug lab has a number of different methods where they can synthesize, or make, a drug. They may have to start with some of the original plant material, but what they do is extract substances from the plant material and then use them to create new substances. Synthesis is nothing more than the formation of a new compound from other compounds. The original penicillin was a substance that was extracted from mold that grew on bread. Today, however, there are entire lines of antibiotics that have been derived from substances that were found in the original penicillin when it was analyzed chemically. Some of those substances were used to create synthetic derivitives of penicillin which resulted in a slightly different drug. Synthesizing drugs is very similar to cooking up something in the kitchen which is why illegal drug labs are colloquially referred to as drug kitchens.