Ecstasy: The Effect Of Manufacturing Processes On Tree-Based Medicine

The Effect of Manufacturing Processes on Tree-Based Medicine Trees can be used to make a wide variety of drugs and medicines – anything from Aspirin or chemotherapy products to ecstasy. What would happen if someone was to switch the processes to manufacture two types of medicine though? One prediction is if you took a yew tree and processed it in the same way that the mreah prew phnom tree is processed to make ecstasy, you will not get chemo medicine. The independent variable is the processing method, and the dependent variable is the medicine or drug that is the result of the processing. The constant is the yew tree, which has been used to make many medicines, including paclitaxel. The control group would be yew going through the usual process used to create paclitaxel.

Yew trees are used …show more content…
Paclitaxel works by stopping cell division, which will kill cancer cells (Hunter, 2013, paragraph 3-6). Docetaxel also halts cell division. It works by damaging the RNA or DNA sequence that tells the cell how to copy itself. The faster the cells try to divide, the more likely the chemotherapy drugs will kill the cells, which, in turn, shrinks the tumor (ChemoCare, n.d., Section: How this drug works, Paragraph 2) Ecstasy is an illicit drug that comes from a tree known as the mreah prew phnom, which comes from Cambodia and has no English translation. Pharmacological studies indicate that ecstasy (MDMA) creates stimulant and psychedelic effects by increasing the production of serotonin and dopamine. Scientists have also found evidence that MDMA may possess toxic properties towards brain