Codeine general questions! Please help!?

Question

Hello, I am doing this assignment and I cannot find ANY information pertaining to codeine. I need info on what plant it can be found in, its biological name and common name for plant, a retail selling price, company that produces it, discovery of it (who where when) etc. Any help (especially about the plant part) would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Codeine, along with morphine and heroin are opiates (plant alkaloids), which all occur naturally in the opium plant, Papaverum somniferum.  It makes a bulbous poppy with a milky resin which contains the opiates.  The opium resin is about 75% morphine, 20% codeine, and 5% heroin.  Heroin can be made from morphine by cooking it in vinegar, which is a form that more easily crosses the blood-brain barrier.

Opium is so old, it is impossible to know who discovered it.

You can learn more from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium