DIY Prison Sentence

A meal in a restaurant is great, but a home-made feast is so much better, right? Even if the quality is on par, it’s the sense of satisfaction that one gets from something that has been made or prepared by themselves. Grandma’s home-made jams and preserves are neck and shoulders above anything you could buy in a store. Drug addicts have been attempting to apply that same idea to their hobby of choice, by growing, processing and using their own product, cutting out the dangers of dealing with shady people. Little do they know, but they are risking much more than if they would simply buy the poison.

Self-Driven Addiction

For as long as people have been using drugs, there is always those that will make them. The age old saying “if there is sheep, there will be shearers” rings true even today. People who make it their business to produce and distribute substances that promote degradation, despair and addiction have mostly been met with disdain. There are tribal communities in Africa, that will take law into their own hands and viciously deal with this kind of individuals their own way, usually burning down the lab and lynching the suspected drug dealer. President of Philippines Rodrigo Duterte has begun a bloody and vicious vigilante approach to root out the drug problems in his country. While the legitimacy and ethicality of Philippino war on drugs are questionable at best, most will agree that the end goal is to clean up the perceived global image of the country to the rest of the world. Sober people don’t want drugs, drug addicts, producers and dealers anywhere near their children and people they love, that is a universal fact.

For drug addicts in hiding, the “Do It Yourself” or DIY approach to obtaining their choice of drug is the best option in these and many other cases. Let’s look at some illegal drugs, that can be made at home and the ingredients required.

Marijuana.

The most popular in this category is most definitely “weed” or marijuana. It is still very illegal in the majority of the world, but their seeds, however, are not. There are plenty of dubious online seed shops that will sell you great varieties of seeds, their official stance for doing so is that they are a collector’s item. Apparently, there are marijuana seed collectors out there and these fully-fledged online stores are for that kind of people. All five of them, no doubt. The rest use them to get their seeds to grow their own weed. Lucky for upstanding citizens these home-made grow-ops use ALOT of electricity and generate plenty of heat, so it is pretty easy to find and bust these. Most of the time these DIY weed farms have no more than a few plants, but the law is the law and they get the book thrown at them as if they had a whole farm since growing the drug is producing it and by definition production and distribution of the drug are the biggest offenses.

Psychedelic mushrooms.

In a very similar fashion to weed, magic mushrooms can be grown in-house. They require practically no attention and the legal part that needs buying can produce large quantities of it. You can buy the mushroom spore solutions in syringes and pouches online. Some even sell an entire, ready to go growing set, with the growth medium, supplements and everything else that is required already included in the package. The law governing psilocybin-containing mushrooms is pretty vague, as only the ready product is illegal. It usually takes for someone to go running naked in public, flinging their own feces at bystanders or a suicide or two for people to remember that psychedelic drugs are just as dangerous, if not as addictive as any Class 1 drug.

Heroin.

Hold up, you can make heroin at home? Not the most potent version of it, but it is doable. While the vile substance made on the slopes of Afghanistan is much more potent, a determined addict can make do with a much more crude and dirty method of preparing it. The Czech Republic is the biggest exporter of poppy seeds in Europe, used for culinary and food preparation these seeds contain only trace amounts of alkaloids required to produce the drug, however, addicts across the country have found better ways to get free “smack”. There is an astounding number of bush-labs across the country that become operational when the annual poppy plant crop is close to maturing. These addicts piggy-back on farmers efforts by making daily raids to almost neverending poppy fields and gathering poppy milk, by scoring the still unripe poppy seed pods and collecting the viscous sap that comes oozing out. Unfortunately, most of these drug users have only heard how to properly prepare this raw sap into something that is “safe” to use, so there are hundreds of overdoses and self-poisonings every year. Severe cramps caused by the burned and unfiltered chlorofil can break bones, provide excruciating pain and eventually death if used repeatedly.

As anyone who has ever attempted to produce home-brewed beer or even just tried to grow some tomatoes, it is not easy to do. Combine the effort with the extremely poisonous nature of the product you end up with, it is a very stupid idea to produce your own drugs. Not only are you more prone to overdosing, you are at constant risk of being charged and tried as a full blown drug manufacturer, not just the user. Do not make the mistake and hope that in the case of being caught, smaller quantities will allow you to go free. Drugs are illegal and should not be toyed with.