Medical Uses of Narcotics?

We have this research paper regarding the medical uses of narcotics in general... Can you give me some websites that have lengthy answers to my question? You can also give several uses of it if you can. Thank you.

There are two ways to define "narcotics": the medical way and the US government way.

The medical definition is drugs derived from the opium poppy. "Narco" is from the Greek for sleep. These drugs put you to sleep. There are several drugs made from the poppy that are used and abused, but in your body all are metabolized to the same active compound, and so effectively they are all the same drug. These drugs include opium, morphine, and heroin.

Medically, they can be used as analgesics, to deaden pain, and anesthetics, to make patients unconscious for surgery. There are also at least a few synthetic versions which used to be used medically. Two I remember are fentanyl and sufentanyl (probably googlable). I don't know if they are still used, but they were also used as analgesics and anesthetics.

The US government, in it's quest to control drug abuse, has adopted a non-medical definition of narcotics. The government includes drugs which are not derived from the opium poppy under the same legal classification, and it is common for law enforcement personnel and politicians to refer to "narcotics" that are not narcotic-type drugs. The government, for example, considers cocaine, a stimulant, and sometimes marijuana, a hallucinogen, as narcotics. These drugs also have medical uses, i.e. cocaine is used to numb the nose and mouth for minor surgery, buy I will guess that your teacher is asking specifically about opioid drugs. If I am wrong, I bet that the Wikipedia entries for those drugs go into these aspects as well.

Good luck.