Cultivated plants are the primary source of supply, since drugs have largely a vegetable origin.
Today, wild plants have been replaced by cultivated ones, essentially for market reasons. Commercial requirements have in fact imposed a quantitatively higher production than in the past. Once, wild plants were the main source of drugs and, even if the few cultivated in the past were nothing compared to the current ones, still today they play a role of enormous pharmaceutical and voluptuous importance, such as the opium poppy, coca and cannabis; all sources of drugs intended mainly for voluptuous use, but which contain active pharmaceutical-type principles: for example morphine, obtained from poppy and from which diacetylation heroin is obtained, is the only active ingredient capable of sedating related pains extremely strong, unbearable contusions and traumas, or associated with terminal conditions; morphine, therefore, has an enormous pharmaceutical importance because, together with its derivatives, it appears to be the last bastion in extreme situations.
The leaves of coca, a plant cultivated for centuries and millennia because "social" plant, were chewed more by necessity than by voluptuary use; today, however, coca has become a demonized plant, because we Europeans use it voluptuously, abusing its active ingredient which becomes astonishing, cocaine. This substance has also had a pharmaceutical history as an anesthetic active ingredient; its molecular structure has also inspired modern anesthetic molecules such as lidocaine and novocaine.
Finally, cannabis is a demonized plant, which possesses morphological and chemical polymorphism; the active principles are in fact the famous cannabinoids. Cannabis has been cultivated for centuries and millennia, not so much for cannabinoids, but for fiber. Fiber hemp was widespread in our territories, but was removed because it was demonized, since in addition to fiber it produced and contained cannabinoids.
The cultivation of plants has then evolved significantly when the market demand for medicines has increased, together with that of consumers and their desire to be able to choose between several plants both in terms of quantity, referred to a single species, and in terms of of quality, referring to several different species.
Once, the few cultivated plants were destined mainly for the voluptuous or pharmaceutical use; moreover, some of them grew in very restricted places, substantially in botanical gardens, called simple vegetable gardens ; these were small plots that were part of the pharmaceutical heritage of the simple (those who simply formulated drugs from drugs). Today, on the other hand, the cultivations are much more extensive and carried out in places where native species are cultivated with medicinal efficacy, or non-native species are imported and cultivated with equal effectiveness, since the environmental factors of the territory do not influence the quality of that particular plant.
The plants cultivated with medicinal interest are many, some examples are cinnamon, chamomile, lavender, licorice, mallow, thyme and many others. There are elements concerning cultivation that are favorable or limiting; the limiting ones are:
the high cost of labor, also depending on the type of drug to be collected (example: chamomile is harvested mechanically, rhubarb by hand, when the plant is now four years old);
the difficulty in finding the characteristic nursery material, a typical problem of drugs with a particularly rare or little distributed exotic source on the continent or with a very narrow market demand;
the lack of adequate local or temporary mechanization.
But, above all, what must always be kept constant is the knowledge of the correct cultivation and collection of drugs, in the sense that the drug must be collected while maintaining the morphological aspects reported in the Pharmacopoeia.
