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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

Kuro5hin's trane claims that it has been legal to grow opium poppies in the US since the early seventies. You can use them for ornamentation, to eat the seeds and so on but not for use as a drug.

I haven't actually looked but expect there is wild opium growing in the high desert of california.

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A very good childhood friend of mine has been growing small amounts papaver somniferum (opium poppies) in his back yard because it is much cheaper than prescription pain killers. He was injured in a car accident and has lived with debilitating pain most of his adult life.

I'm curious, has he avoided opium addiction or is it just that the effects of addiction are less bad than his pain?

We have always generally been pretty responsible drug users throughout our lives, and so he knows how to avoid addiction, or to minimize its affect on him. Opioids are easy to escalate in dose and frequency, and for some years I was prescribed oxycodone for my pain, but I did not abuse it, because I had his help in avoiding addiction. I think education is the best tool to avoid this.

They are listed as a scheduled substance - including both the flower and straw meaning you can't actually grow them, but no one enforces it for ornamental purposes.

It's my understanding that the ornamental ones, being bred for the flowers, don't have much in terms of opiates.

</gardener>

Papaver somniferum is a large, pretty flower. As nice as most other poppies.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Papaver_somniferum_(2...

As the famous Michael Pollan article notes[0], P. somniferum is also sold as P. paeoniflorum, there's very little oversight. And of course if there was, the DEA would have to burn down lots of gardens. P. Bracteatum contains thebaine and can be used to produce codeine with a little ochem[1] and I see it growing in plenty of yards.

0: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/opium-made-easy/

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_bracteatum

A few years ago I was introduced to a fellow through an acquaintance of mine. We were attending a BBQ one evening and I noticed what looked to be poppies growing in a planter. So I asked him about it and he confirmed my suspicions. According to him, the area (Northern California valley) was great for growing them. I had no idea and had never seen any in person.

I'd never thought about it before, but poppy-seed muffins are fairly popular in Western culture; what is the source of all of those seeds? Is it a similar situation as Coca-Cola has with the DEA?

There are different varieties of poppies. Some are unsuitable for narcotics production as they don't produce the opiates in question.

Still, consider the following information which I had assumed to be an urban legend but is apparently true:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/poppyseed.asp

Will those unsuitable for narcotics production still yield a positive test result?

Also it highly interests me to find an edge case that various law-enforcement agencies haven't handled at all.

I'm not sure and can't do any quick research as I'm at work. I'm generally interested in traditional pharmacology but have to admit that opiates don't interest me very much compared to other naturally occurring psychoactive substances.

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