Opium poppies are very very easy to grow.
Drinking opium tea for pain relief is probably a bad idea.
Drinking opium tea for pain relief is probably a bad idea.
I'd also hazard an (uneducated) guess that the number of seeds (and hence land area) required would render this unpractical for most people?
No, opium is highly addictive. It tends to be eaten, drunk, or smoked, not injected, and that route of administration makes a difference. But the actual substance is addictive.
Opium poppies provide their own seeds. A small garden provides plenty of space for small scale opium growing.
If I was in pain I would want a refined quality controlled product. I wouldn't want variable unpredictable doses. I need to be able to function (so too much is bad) and I want to control pain (so too little is bad).
But I don't live in a free country, so I mayn't do that.
As you doubtless know, I didn't say it wasn't - I said it was less addictive that 'pharmaceutical grade' opioids.
In fact, pure morphine has fewer side effects than opium. Opium has alkaloids that can cause severe nausea, etc.
Yes, it's well known that the alkaloid morphine causes nausea[1]. I can tolerate up to 30mg of immediate-release morphine (prescribed!), but beyond that I get bad nausea that is seriously off-putting. The nausea would certainly be a barrier to me getting addicted!
Morphine is however just one of the many alkaloids that make up opium - together they have a different effect than morphine alone.
I can't quickly find a reference beyond Wikipedia[1] that mentions opium being less addictive than, for example, morphine, but I read a lot of papers on drugs and have read this before. I'll try and find some and post back if I do.
So perhaps the poppy also produces a substance that creates an aversion affect (probably due to extreme nausea) when it reaches a certain concentration in the body. If you approach an overdose, you might start puking your guts out, and wouldn't even be able to look at a 1928 O'Keeffe painting without clamping your jaw shut.
With purified morphine or heroin or methadone, you might just fall asleep and never wake up.
But the raw plant material might also contain something you don't know about that erodes the septum in your heart, and you die from chronic use instead of overdose. That's just one of the risks with whole-plant drugs.
Generally speaking, we have attempted to eliminate hidden side effects by using purified molecules, and attempted to overcome overdose by using prescriptions from trained experts. That isn't necessarily the best or only way to run civilization's pharmacy.
What do you mean exactly when you say "the actual substance is addictive"? Does it contain addictaniolol? What you are saying makes no sense. People are either prone to be addicted to a substance or they aren't. Blaming the substance doesn't help anyone and it means nothing.
If "the actual substance" were actually addictive, as you seem to believe, then every person without exception would be addicted to it after one try. Clearly that isn't the case, therefore there is nothing inherent in opium, nor any other drug, that makes itself addictive.