Here it can either be bought or prescribed, our laws are thankfully, rather lax as to what can be bough in order to stuff a cork up your backside. They 'even' sell o.6g/500ml codeine syrup albeit its going out of fashion quicker than stepping in dog crap, I only know one place in the entire CITY that cells opium tincture (aka gee's linctus, its kinda spicy and if you carefully boil it down so as not to theo piate content or the fire, its got a really nice peppery taste, if you are super-careful so as to tread the line between opiate and chewy, you can make the worlds best (IMO) toffee from it:autism:
The codeine syrup, I only know one place for it, and online as well, which is a shit, because I need a specific brand of codeine syrup for my signature cocktail, the 'manhattan project' (its a blend of tesco own brand (has to be the cheap own brand stuff, nothing else, nothing else will do, lime soda, plus some vodka, a good brand, grey goose or stoli, the vodka/lime soda mix floated carefully over the far denser syrup, then one uses artfully arranged slices of lemon and lime to 'lock' a little glass of diethyl ether (diisopropyl if needs must, or a mix, can live with it, don't taste as good plus DIPE likes to go boom from peroxidation) into place, with a little grated lime zest.
Personal special, got a kick like a nuke, tastes great, packs one helluva punch, but its getting SO hard to get the ingredients for it, as it HAS to be this specific brand of cough linctus, care+, no other can fill in for it. Its got, of all the surprising things, chloroform as a preservative, and although hepatotoxic, and a figure from the victorian ages, its still there, some sort of ancient throwback, I figure for a once in a blue moon sort of use like blending a special cocktail, fair enough, its not like I'll never go through a few hundred liters at least, of chloroform in a lifetime, just enough to lend a cocktail a flavour element, isn't going to kill me, but it does PISS me off that its only possible to make for one bottle of the syrup a month, enough to make perhaps two or three of the cocktails, and I shouldn't have to conserve the stuff as if it were platinum plated electrodes, just to make any at all (the other versions of codeine syrup are made either of pine oil as an additive, which both tastes AND smells disgusting, or synthetic sugar-free orange and they are both pretty foul in their own right), but just this one brand, can be used for a manhattan project (pun off the US nuclear weapons dev project), anything else, and it would taste like sucking on a humongous arse, shouldn't have to walk an entire city's length just to find one of the key ingredients for a cocktail, sufficient for two, or perhaps three people to enjoy (the other being the ether, although that I've no problem at all finding, its just this highly specific brand of cough syrup, thats going out of fashion big time, thats really difficult to find) Ether, I can buy in 10/20 cans if I need to, but this fucking cough mixture is going the way of the damn dinosaurs, and it does make for the keystone of a REALLY good cocktail, if made right. Now its something I can only serve to a truly honored guest, and if I wish to partake myself, ideally knowing they'll be here a month or more in advance.
