Pentagon warns poppy seeds might cause troops to fail drug tests
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Important to note this isn't a false positive (i.e., not a problem with lab procedures). I don't know the medical side of this, but at least some of the toxicologists I spoke with were concerned that, at sufficient quantities, affected individuals could experience adverse health events based on consumption of the contaminated poppy seeds.
(Also: the DoD reporting cutoff for codeine was already significantly higher than the industry standard, to try to eliminate or minimize the possibility of this happening.)
Did they give you hard numbers? Is that 1 poppy seed? 1 teaspoon of poppy seed? 1 pound of poppy seed?
The dose makes the poison. The problem is that the tests are oversensitive. It's like failing a drug test due to a coffee in the morning because it may be an excuse to be taking pure caffeine pills.
As I clearly explained, this is due to contamination, possibly due to poor washing. The quantity needed is therefore going to depend on the level of contamination.
> The problem is that the tests are oversensitive.
The DoD has been operating on a 2000ng/mL cutoff, which is high, so... no.
Also, the food supply is contaminated with opiates and your first thought is that the tests are too sensitive?
> Also, the food supply is contaminated with opiates and your first thought is that the tests are too sensitive?
Yes, exactly. The dose makes the poison.
For example in the north of Argentina (were my parents come from), it's common to chew coca leaves [1]. They have cocaine! (There is also coca tea.) It's part of the local traditions and even part of the old religions (that are now somewhat mixed with the chistian religions). They have cocaine! But the dose is so low that you can get as high as drinking a cup of coffee. That has caffeine! Do you want to ban worldwide coca chewing, coffee, tea, ...
Note that it's not equivalent to taking pure cocaine that is extracted proceeding a very huge amount of coca leaves. Like it's not equivalent a cup of coffee to pure caffeine.
Anyway, national and international regulation sometimes ignore this local details and doses, and you may get in trouble.
[1] Spanish: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acullico The English article is too short. Autotranslation: https://es-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Acullico?_x_t...
It does not matter how many poppy seeds there are. It matters how much poppy latex remains on them. The poppy seed itself contains no opiates.
The quantitative measure you're looking for is widely variable, because—again—it's not a matter of how many poppy seeds, but the level of contamination at the source. Five years ago it may have been practically impossible. Now, one poppy seed muffin in one experiment with one participant led to a codeine urinalysis result of 1300ng/mL. Others were usually lower, but without wider experimentation it's hard to say what the maximum value is or what the true error bars are.
The tests are not the issue.
It looks like 1kg (2 pounds) of [unwashed?] poppy seeds are addictive but not lethal. I'm not sure how to extrapolate that to the minimal active dose.
How many poppy seeds does bread/desert have? 5%? 10%? You must eat like 10Kg (20 pounds). A normal person eats like 1kg of food per day. Also a reputable bakery will use washed-but-not-perfectly-washed poppy seeds instead of unwashed poppy seeds, so you should multiply the amount of bread x10 or x100.
No, that isn't what the cited reference says. Poppy seeds are neither addictive nor lethal.
> How many poppy seeds does bread/desert have? 5%? 10%? You must eat like 10Kg (20 pounds). A normal person eats like 1kg of food per day. Also a reputable bakery will use wash
No. See above.
> Also a reputable bakery will use washed-but-not-perfectly-washed poppy seeds instead of unwashed poppy seeds
False. The contamination with poppy latex is not immediately apparent and not always labeled. The discovery of significant contamination—consistent with unwashed poppy seeds, in widely available commercial baked goods—is why we issued the Brady notice.
Had a buddy in rehab who wanted to screw around with them; so we researched and made up a "vitamin powder" he could put in his milkshakes there (and share freely: totally innocent, non-narcotic blah stuff). Which resulted in lighting up his urine tests like a Christmas tree. Poppy seeds, valerian root, morning glory ... i forget the rest. not much was needed.
It was hilarious but then they started doing the blood tests on him and kept him a while longer to counsel him on his attitude. Epic stunts may sometimes be worth the cost.
It is possible to get high on each one of the items you listed there... Morning glory contains LSA, which will trigger LSD tests (but can get you high in its own right). As a side note, most common drug tests do not test for LSD. Valerian root contains a number of GABAergic alkaloids, though I don't believe it will trigger any of the tests for GABAergic drugs like eg alcohol or benzodiazepines. Again, neither of those are in the most common drug test panels. And poppy seeds need to be washed to get the opiate alkaloids off: people use unwashed poppy seeds to make poppy tea recreationally. PST is functionally equivalent to taking opium orally.
Even if this so-called vitamin powder was intended to be a joke, it was absolutely not non-narcotic.
Some of the bagels were poppy seed and one of my new-coworkers commented "well, guess we're not doing drug tests."
The "what can cause false positives" is a "this should be well known" and if someone has a positive result and claims that they've eaten poppy seeds, then get a hair sample and test that.
If you're in an industry that is likely to have random drug tests, it may be wise to avoid poppy seeds.
https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/education/can-poppysee...
FTFY
They're usually not testing for intoxication, but any use at all (where possible). What's the point? Who cares what someone did last week? Meanwhile, you can be 200% hungover and blow 0.00 for alcohol even though it has totally affected you.
> But it becomes a problem when the pilot, who is a good aviator, is addicted to something due to depression
Sauce? Not ideal, but where's the problem with successful self-treatment of depression?
> due to depression
Any 2-brain-celled pilot would never admit to any psych issue whatsoever anyway.
It was this stuff. https://shop.coles.com.au/a/national/product/coles-bakery-br...
What is it that they don’t want us to know in Canada?
The LD50 is only about 4x the recreational dose of heroin. So this is a dangerous class of drugs to play around with if the intent is to get high
For this Poppy straws - the whole dried plant with everything but the seeds - are used which are far more richer in opiate alkaloids.
In 1927, a Hungarian successfully chemically extracted opiate alkaloids from just using the crushed capsules [1]. Today 90% of all legally derived morphine is through poppy straw concentrate (PCS) [2].
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_heroin
[1]https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bu...
[2]https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2008/WDR2008_100year...