This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, January 8th, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

There's a new drug making its way through the illicit drug sector and the solutions that policymakers are likely to

adopt and response will likely be just as counterproductive as those adopted for fentanyl.

Cato's Jeff Singer explains.

First, Jeff, a few definitions.

What are the differences between opiates and opioids? Well, opiates are the natural derivative of the opium poppy. So

they haven't been altered chemically in any way. You might want to think of it as like, you know,

raw cane sugar versus processed sugar. So opiates, for example, are morphine and codeine.

Codeine is, they both derive directly from the poppy. In fact, codeine is they both derived directly from the poppy. In fact codeine when it is

ingested it gets metabolized into two products. One is the active product, morphine and the other

isn't and is excreted.

So you could almost look at morphine as unprocessed, I mean a codeine is unprocessed morphine.

Opioids are these opiates that have been chemically modified to try to bring out certain features in them,

either make them more powerful or shorter acting or learning.

So you add a couple of molecules to the opiate like oxycodone, hydrocodone, or Vicodin is it's often called,

or hydromorphone or the laudan as it's called, or diacetyl morphine which is brand name is heroin so those are

opioids and then there are some those are called semi synthetic opioids because they're

kind of part the natural and part additions.

And then there's synthetic opioids which are completely made in the laboratory

without using any of the original plant derivative,

and those will be like fentanyl or the opioid we're going to talk about today

nidazines such as isotokinitazine. So we should understand that opiates are a

...