[whyenot]

a pipe dream

Opium poppy (Papaver somniferous) is actually kind of an interesting case. At least in the US, it's OK to grow the plants, the flowers are showy and many seed catalogs sell the seeds. It's also OK to harvest the pods and consume the seeds (poppy seeds, have them on a bagel). But, if you scrape off and collect the latex on the outside of the pods, you are committing a felony.

[mirimir]

I thought that varieties currently sold have little morphine. Or at least, I recall that one ex wife had an heirloom variety from her mother. Which supposedly had lots of morphine. Not that I ever tested it.

[whyenot]

The varieties people plant in their gardens aren't bred specifically for a high alkaloid content, but the chemicals are still present.

[xkcd-sucks]

Try buying a bag of poppyseeds from the baking aisle, shake it up in a liter of room temperature water and drink a few cups of that water.

[mirimir]

Wow, is that really true?

Apparently not:[0]

> While the drug test can rule out heroin, it can’t distinguish the poppy seed from other opiates. This became such an issue that the federal government raised its threshold for opiates in workplace testing from .3 micrograms per milliliter to 2 micrograms so there would be fewer cases of positive opiate testing in situations where drugs where not the cause.

> Sure, the poppy seeds you buy at the store contain between 0.5 to 10 micrograms of morphine per gram, but a dose of medically-prescribed morphine contains anywhere between 5,000 to 30,000 micrograms. So to get that same dose from the seeds you eat, you’d have to potentially eat a ridiculous amount of them.

So you'd need to consume stuff extracted from at least 0.5-1.0 kg of poppy seeds. Or perhaps as much as 10 kg. That's not impossible, if you know what you're doing, and have the right equipment.

But it'd be impractical, and expensive. And then there's the risk that you'll have other toxic stuff. Insecticides or fungicides, for example. So you'd also want to purify your morphine.

However, what's interesting is the possibility of using poppy seeds to mask usage of other opiates. The article notes that drug tests "can rule out heroin, [but] can’t distinguish the poppy seed from other opiates". So perhaps you could eat lots of poppy seed cake, and hide your oxycodone habit ;)

0) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opium-poppy-seeds_n_59709d98e...

[krispyfi]

The resulting potency is difficult to estimate, and people have died from getting it wrong. Please don't recommend for people to do poppy seed tea without warning them of the danger.