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ZooL

Interesting story(if accurate...).

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A week or so ago I caught up with an old friend i hadn't seen in a while and at some point during the night of heavy drinking the conversation arrived at the topic of opium, the old friend made a reference to someone that they knew(that had a relative, etc) that said they used to grow opium poppies from supermarket bought seeds and then let them grow for around 4 or 5 weeks planted in a pot(like alfalfa as described) and would then harvest/dry and smoke and this was said to have a very noticeable morphine like effect at around 2g smoked. at the time my skepticism dismissed this and just bs or misconceptions around the opium poppy as i am under the impression that the only viable concentrations of alkaloids would be present in the sap from seed pods. I sort of forgot about this then remembered the conversation a couple days ago and did a little bit of crude research and found some references in some old books from the 30's-50's from a guy named Peter Valaer that did in fact detect alkaloids present  in seedlings but the information was very sparse and made no mention of concentration, but after this i am now somewhat curious if there may be something to this story.

 



Does anyone have any knowledge around this that could shed some light as to whether there is something to this story or if it is just random bs?

 

 



(clearly i have no interest personally in the application of this and any such knowledge should only ever be employed by the commercial poppy producers that supply our benevolent pharmaceutical companies and i am just asking out of curiosity)

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Hypothetically, I would suggest, if one was to bother getting them to that stage, then one may as well let them finish to pod stage.

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Probably would be right as is likely the reason it is still grown commercially that way. I was just thinking that if the content of useful things was comparable then it could possibly allow it to be grown in trays on racks stacked many high instead of just 1 layer planted in a field. and also seasonal time(not sure if poppies even require that) and light would not really matter and could allow for perpetual replanting at any time. 

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Straw gets processed as well.... Yield is only due to volume and process. 

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Sounds true, im pretty sure most if not all poppy seeds bought at the supermarkets are Papaver Somnifarum, couldnt imagine the heat treating process to work 100% of the time :wink:

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I know people make tea from the seeds, and i'd be very surprised if the rest of the plant was alkoloid free. Go look for vids of wallabies in Tasmania spaced out from eating the poppies. plus there is a mix of alkoloids in poppies, thebaine , codiene, morphine are the three i remember of the top of my head sure there are more (papervium, narceine and narcotoline) plus as Waterboy said the whole plant is harvested for extraction. Not sure why it is the prefer pharmaceutical route i'd of though using yeast bacteria to convert a start chemical in the presence of sugar,  extract then convert to the desired compound(certain that how it's done in some Indian factories) One of my relatives who grew up in eastern Europe in 1960-70's says they used to boil the whole head to make baby teething relief like the more english alcohol on the gums except alcohol was to important for the adults to drink away there shit life. And Poles make what they call compote out  of the whole plant to get morphine homebake. I imagine in afganistan the cost of regents to extract the straw isn't worth it. And the "Black Tar Heroin" from mexico isn't heroin its MAM which i one actyl bond off  plus has lots of filler. So thats why the pods are scored since most is locally grown buy farmers its the easiest method for most return.

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Can confirm. A friend of mine told me the same story and i was like 'wtf bs man' so i threw about a kg of various store bought poppy seed around my yard along with some papaver somniferum var giganteum. My friend told me that 'Spencers' brand was the best. It actually says on the back of the packet that it is seed from papaver somniferum and that papaver somniferum is harvested for codeine and morphine. 

I had to thin them out numerous times because 1kg was far too much seed for my yard.  I was just excited. The store bought poppies did contain alkaloids, but the pods were small. Then again, all I had to compare to that was 'strain' was the giganteum pods. I'd just grow giganteum if I did it again, but it's worth growing store bought poppy seed if it's all you can get.

I actually walked up and down my street and threw 1kg around people's yards on my block near reticulation also. Nothing ever came up sadly.

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On 19/03/2020 at 10:06 PM, Acacia said:

L

I actually walked up and down my street and threw 1kg around people's yards on my block near reticulation also. Nothing ever came up sadly.

Imagine hiring a helium bottle and putting a handful of seed in each Ballon.  Then letting them go, theyd go up and the rain down seeds everywhere 

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