SHORTENING an industry’s supply chain is bound to affect the activities of existing suppliers. That is as true of the recreational-drugs industry as it is of any other. Some street pharmaceuticals, such as methamphetamine and cannabis, are already made near their main consumer markets—whether manufactured in laboratories or grown under cover in neighbouring countries. But others, particularly cocaine and heroin, still have to be imported from far-flung places where the plants which produce them flourish in the open (think of poppies in Afghanistan).
If these internationally traded commodities could be produced locally, the cartels that now smuggle them might find themselves out of business. Savvy drug barons will therefore be reading their copies of Nature Chemical Biology with particular interest—for the current edition of the journal contains a paper describing a technology that could completely disrupt their business models.
It may, to be fair, also change the businesses of legitimate drug companies. For the authors of this paper, John...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Aghhdv
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