tribalbeeyatch

I just read an article on this very topic. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me remember where it was. Apparently the DEA has publicly acknowledged that it basically doesn't enforce the law prohibiting the cultivation of P. somniferum. They admitted that it was so as not to have to haul away untold numbers of grandmotherly types that are growing these poppies across the US. There are a few notable exceptions to this general policy, though, so that doesn't mean that cultivation is entirely without risks. One of the stories in this article was about the DEA pressuring the curators of the Thomas Jefferson museum to uproot all of his heirloom poppies and destroy the seed packets they were selling. There was also some pressure applied to mainstream seed distributors to get them to stop selling P. somniferum seeds. They have been largely ignored on that front, but it has produced a curious increase in the number of available Papaver varietals. Basically, seed distributors have taken to renaming plain old somniferum with inventive new names to help remove the opium taint. The article mentioned P. garganthenum (or something close) as one of these new inventions, and I wonder if this is also true of paeoniflorum.

never been there

Funny, there was an article in the American Chemical Society's magazine Chemical and Engineering News (the back page, where the funny stuff goes) about how bakers sometimes indulge in poppy-seed tea. One guy was going through hundreds of grams of seed a day, didn't realize what he was into until he took a break from it and came down with a case of cramps that sent him to the hospital.

I think it was the same issue with the story about the guy who ingested a whole vial of wormwood extract thinking it was equivalent to a shot of absinthe.

The first guy survived, the second didn't.