I just watched an episode of CSI:NY from this spring- Point of No Return and something has been bugging me about it. Following are open spoilers for the episode.
In the episode, some heroin residue is discovered beside a dead body. When doing a chemical analysis on the heroin, they discover that the heroin has human prions in it. It turns out that an old medical examiner had been taking organs out of overdose victims and extracting the heroin out of them and trying to sell the heroin to pay off his debts. It wasn’t quite clear to me how it was extracted, but they showed a blood stained storage unit that a laboratory set up where he did it.
I don’t know much about human anatomy or drugs, so the episode made me curious. So, is it possible to extract usable heroin from someone that has a lot of it in their blood? How much could be extracted? In the episode, I think he had about a kilo of heroin he was trying to sell, but it wasn’t clear how many bodies he had gone through to make that. Would it be possible for other drugs?
I realize that I shouldn’t be looking for accurate science in any of the CSI shows, but it was still something that made me curious.
I know that many drugs will come out in the urine relatively untouched. IIRC frex they used to filter out pennicillin from teh test patients and the early patients until production got high enough that they didnt have to. I know that I can smell the meds I am on in my urine. I would not be surprised if you could filter out something I am taking.
Heroin is the common name of diacetylmorphine. Basically, it is a morphine molecule with two acetyl groups added to the sides in order to make it more lipophillic so it will pass through the blood-brain barrier more effectively (ie, faster). The acetyl groups are then cleaved off in the brain, and it becomes regular old morphine. Now, since it supposedly came from someone who overdosed I could see some non-changed heroin being in the rest of the body, but I wouldn’t expect too much of it.
Now, Prions are just mis-folded proteins, they aren’t too common, plus heroin isn’t a protein, so, I don’t see why there would be any proteins in the sample at all. Whatever filtering was done to extract the heroin would most likely exclude any proteins since proteins are much MUCH bigger then heroin, and if the filter would allow prions through, then it would allow pretty much anything through.
So… Don’t think it is possible, and even if it was, the way they found out would make no sense at all.
I hear meth works this way (the urine way), but I don’t have any definitive reference at my fingertips. Maybe I can find the pharmacokinetics on Gold Standard tomorrow at work.
It seems like if you had the kind of degrees that it would take to be a medical examiner then you’d make more per hour than you’d make selling heroin after a tortuous distillery process. I know I’m not supposed to think about it, but there you go.
Im not sure that regular MEs get that huge a salary. I think the ones that rake in the dough are the ones that are famous for something and get invited to lecture and write books [like the ones that you see in interviews on tv, and wrote books on like Marilyn Monroe] or the ones that get hired to do the court room circuit testifying for the defendants.
Yeah, but imagine what it would cost to distill heroin from overdose corpses? (Recall, of course, that nowhere near all of the corpses he gets would be heroin addicts.)
How much is the heroin in a corpse even worth? I’m pretty ignorant of drug prices… but I can’t imagine that there’s possibly more than a few hundred dollars worth of heroin in the worst overdose cases. And now you’ve got to extract it (how? filter blood, urine, and mash up a few organs?), and yields will be pretty low. So maybe the ME can get ten or twenty percent yields… after hours of work, they’ve got tens of dollars worth of drugs.
Working the night shift at McDonalds would be easier and probably would earn more money.
Oh, and seconded that there’s no way that prions would be in a reasonable heroin extraction. That’s like trying to get sea salt from an ocean, and accidentally contaminating it with several beached whales…
When you take heroin, what comes out in your urine is at first 6-monoacetylmorphine, morphine, and codeine. The 6-monoacetylmorphine disappears pretty quickly as the heroin metabolizes, and then you just get morphine and codeine.
Thank you everyone for your answers. I’m currently unemployed, so I have a lot more time to watch TV and ponder the silly things that happen on it. It looks like it was as I guessed, a very unlikely if not impossible story line.
A serious addict does around 300 to 500mg of heroin. 500mg is enough to cause an overdose in an addict, 200-300mg in a non-tolerant person. The street price of heroin in Chicago floats around $100 a gram. So if the addict ODs on 500mg at best you’re making $50. 1mg? $100 dollars.
Then of course is the issue of what you get out of his urine or blood looks nothing like heroin and probably isnt heroin anymore, nor is it as much. The product, if viable, will most likely sell for a lot less. Seems like a lot of trouble for maybe $50.