Warning: Do not try this at home unless you have a death wish, an ample supply of methadone, or enjoy being anally raped by fat men named Bubba.

INGREDIENTS

STEP ONE: MAKE OPIUM.
Obtaining raw opium from a poppy plant is something of an art form. The opium base is a latex-like substance that builds up in the pod of the plant after it sheds its flower. To get to the opium, you have to score the surface of the pod, by drawing tiny dotted lines with a sharp knife. This will make the opium slowly ooze out of the pod. You can expect to get about 80mg of opium out of each poppy you score.

This opium base is not pure, though: you will first want to boil it in water and strain out the twigs, stems, and other foreign objects that have worked their way in. Boiling the resultant liquid again, letting the water evaporate, will give you a nice goopy blob of opium that you can either smoke on the spot or continue to process into newer, more exciting narcotics.

STEP TWO: MAKE MORPHINE.
"But this node is supposed to be about heroin!" you say. No, sailor, you have to make morphine before you can make heroin. To do this, you need to dissolve the opium you've just refined in another pot of boiling water, and add about one part of lime for every five parts of opium. When the mixture cools, the drugs in the opium will still be dissolved, but the other substances in the opium will solidify as a salt on the bottom. Filter the mixture and throw the solids out.

You now need to heat the solution and add ammonia until the solution reaches a slightly basic state, with a pH of around 8-9 (a pool testing kit helps here). Once the pH reaches the target range, remove the solution from the heat. The morphine and codeine in the solution will solidify as a dark powder on the bottom: filter it out, and throw the water away. Let the powder dry in the sun.

STEP THREE: MAKE HEROIN.
The next step is to dissolve the morphine in about three times as much acetic anhydride over medium heat. Leave it alone for a few hours so that the morphine can completely dissolve. The chemical reactions will leave you with a solution of acetic acid and heroin base, which you dilute with water. Add a shot of chloroform and let the solution sit for about 20 minutes: the chloroform will pull the impurities to the bottom of the pot, and you can pour out the good solution from the top. Add the sodium carbonate to the good solution until it has a fairly neutral pH, filter the neutral mixture through cloth, and set the white grains aside to dry.

You don't have heroin yet, but you're getting close. The last step in the process is to take this powder, dissolve it in ether and alcohol, and slowly add more acid until the solution is converted to a hydrochloric salt. Add more ether and alcohol, and let the salt harden until it becomes pure, street-ready heroin.

Now go spot some trains.

Source: INR 4931 "Drug Trafficking," Florida International University, et al. Whoever said poli sci wasn't useful?