[Aliska]

Any bread poppy seeds can make you fail a drug test. With the opium poppy, I'd have to look it up, but the seeds should be safe to eat. The opium is in the milky sap they slit the pod while green and catch the drips. Then I don't know how heroin is processed after that.

Such a beautiful flower. Such a horrid addictive drug.

[DesertRhino]

Ok, stupid question here. Is it legal to grow an opium poppy like as a garden plant? Or is it like a pot plant that you cant have at all? Is an opium poppy something a gardener would ever want to grow just because its a poppy? Like a Flanders fields thing?

[wardaddy]

It’s also Gods gift to those in horrible pain

[BenLurkin]

A minor complaint that I have — you can never find poppy seed bagels anymore.

[Daffynition]

When I lived in the M.E. in the '60s, I saw the poppy fields in Kandahar province, Afghanistan. As far as the eye could see, endless stretches of beautiful flowers

During this time, the USDA was busy *teaching* the Afghan farmer how to increase production of their crops, and to grow more products for export, and economic advantage.

The minute the USDA left, the farmers turned their new-found knowledge [Farmers found they could earn as much as $203 a kilogram for harvested opium, compared with only 43 cents a kilogram for wheat or $1.25 for rice] to poppy production ...and when the Russians left, the Taliban arrived and the rest is history.

No good deed, goes unpunished.