September 23, 2004

Opium Made Easy: One gardener's encounter with the war on drugs.
posted by Gyan 20 years ago
  • So, what about poppyseed muffins? Are those the same kinds of seeds? Maybe the Safeway bakery is a front for an international drug cartel, trafficing opium via baked goods.
  • Read this in the magazine. Amazing story.
  • Dr. Robotnik: Yes, they are the same seeds, although the ones you buy for baking are sometimes either treated so they won't grow or have been specifically breeded so that they will only produce a very small amount of opium.
  • Oh yeah, baby! I am soooo growing me some poppies!
  • Man, I am so not allowed to comment in this thread. (Gardener.)
  • Ok, Wolof, time to confess. Spill it.
  • Tinfoil's link must be the reason for this page, which I came across last night after reading the story and doing a little more research on the topic. I thought it was just a scare tactic. Purely academic, I swear.
  • Spill it. Don't you have a garden?
  • man. our house out west had a whole mess of poppies growing in the east side of the back yard. they were awesome - big, organe, looked like crepe paper at full bloom. the seed heads were fun to shake - they made nice rattles. and all this time i never knew i grew up in an opium farm. man. my parents (schoolteachers both) must be some kind of criminals. that has got to be why my brother and sister are potheads. (i have an excuse. i'm still in college.)
  • Excellent link Gyan! Cheers. Now if only I knew the species of poppy that grow in my front yard.
  • No one in my home town can plant poppies in their front gardens, because they're almost instantly stolen. I haven't had any stolen from our front garden yet, but this is only our second spring in this house so we'll see. I should add that people are too dumb to know that it's only certain types of poppies that are useful for that sort of thing, so they just take all poppies. Makes Anzac Day amusing.
  • Interesting thing posted at Mefi: It seems that morphine naturally occurs in the human brain. Helps to understand why some people really take to heroin. They are probably morphine-deficient.
  • Frogs: I've always grown bunches of poppies, and they grow wild in the desert around old homestead. Hmmmm .... Teatime! Oh, surely you don't think .... It's Earl Grey. Or Constant Comment. Lapsang Suchong, anyone?