Subject: Poppy Tea Essentials Date: 14 Jul 1997 23:06:38 +0200 _ How to make poppy tea _ 1. Buy poppies. Poppy seedpods ('heads') can be found in many stores that sell dried flowers. Usually they come in bundles of 30 or so. Cost varies. I buy good quality heads for US$15/bundle. Good quality heads? Well, you can't necessarily tell by looking at them, but as a rule of thumb, bigger is better. Incidentally, i have found that heads containing black seeds are better than those containing beige seeds, but I do not know the significance of this. And, yes, if they look like Papaver somniferum, they are Papaver somniferum. Ovoid, light-brown (when dried), walnut-sized, with a crown on top. You really can't miss them. 2. Buy (if you don't own) a coffee grinder. These sell at Starbuck's for $19.95 -- sometimes with a complimentary half pound of coffee. 3. Buy (if you don't own) a filter of some sort. Jim Hogshire, author of "Opium for the Masses", recommends a metal strainer. (Oh, and buy that book, too -- $14.95 from Loompanics, www.loompanics.com**). I find a plastic or gold coffee filter works fine. You just want something that will not let the ground straw through, and at the same time will not absorb any liquid that passes through it. 4. Pop the heads off the stems and pour out the seeds. (I recommend that you also rinse the heads -- as with any fruit, they have probably been sprayed with pesticides.) Break the heads apart with thumb and forefinger, and put them in the coffee grinder, grind as many as you can fit, and then grind some more. You may also grind some pieces of stem, if you have nothing better to do with them. There is not likely much opium in them, but it can't hurt. 5. Boil a cup or two of water, and pour your head grinds in. Hogshire suggests that boiling the straw for too long will decompose the morphine. I'm not sure if this is true, but better safe than sorry. Just let it cool and steep as you would making any other kind of tea. (Personally, I like to boil it a little. These poppies are not meant for human consumption, no one has made sure that they're aseptic. There may be something there worth killing. Or I may be paranoid.) 6. Pour the tea into a cup through your filter. Squeeze as much out of the pulp as you can with the back of a ladle or the bottom of a bottle. You may want to heat some more water and repeat with the sapped pulp, as there is still opium in there. (Obviously, though, with each successive brewing there will be diminishing returns. I usually do it three times.) 7. Drink. _ Q & A_ 1. How does it taste? Not bad. Sort of nutty. A spritz of lemon juice is nice. (Hogshire surmises that the citric acid in lemon juice may convert some morphine into heroin. No way. True, citric acid is basically three acetic acid molecules lumped together, but even pure glacial acetic acid reacts with morphine to form 3- and 6-monoacetylmorphine, not diacetylmorphine.) 2. What's in it? Opium contains sulfate and meconate salts of of some 40 alkaloids. (If anyone has a Merck handy, could you tell me what the hell meconate/meconic acid is?) Pharmacologically active components include noscapine (non-narcotic antitussive), papaverine (antispasmotic), thebaine (convulsant, but also a precursor to such narcotics as oxycodone), morphine, codeine and more. The only two likely to be present in truly significant amounts are noscapine (~5%) and morphine (~10%). 3. How much morphine is in it? Hard to say. Assuming 10% morphine and total extraction from each pod, and assuming an average of 80 mg opium per pod (the figure the DEA uses to estimate opium production capacity based on cultivated acreage), and assuming that each pod weighs about 1 gram -- do the math. ...80 mg per 10 pods. Of course it could be less, and it could be more. But it's not peanuts any way you cut it. 4. Is it legal? No. Though some would say it's in a gray area, it's really not. Poppy straw, which is what you have when you break up the heads and prepare them for opium extraction, is a Schedule II Controlled Substance under 21 CFR 1308.12, and in the US, posession of a Controlled Substance without a prescription (or other authorizing document) is a crime. Poppy straw is also controlled under international law. The gray area is in the flower shop, where what would be a Controlled Substance were it sold for human consumption appears not to be if it is sold for decorative purposes. So, if anyone asks you what you plan to do with those poppies, they are for _decorative purposes only_... Sort of the way bongs are for tobacco use only... -- ** - No, I am not affiliated with Jim Hogshire or Loompanics. In fact, I think 15 bucks is a lot to pay for a 100-page paperback. But you do get the Loompanics catalog free with your purchase, which is pretty cool, and I think Hogshire deserves all the support we can give him after all he's been through. ==================================================================== Subject: Re: Poppy Tea Essentials Date: 16 Jul 1997 11:48:03 +0200 Jim Hogshire replies: > May I add some commentary to this excellent post? It's a free country. Sort of. > > And, yes, if they look like Papaver somniferum, they are Papaver > > somniferum. Ovoid, light-brown (when dried), walnut-sized, with a crown on > > top. You really can't miss them. > > Really, you can't tell by looking at them. I forced the state to dismiss > their fucked-up charges against me on this point. There are 250+ > varieties of poppy. I've seen probably four or five distinct varieties > on sale as dried, "ornamental" poppies. Including what I think could > well be P. somniferum. But I wouldn't swear to it ;-) But you'd be able to tell if they were, say, P. orientalis, wouldn't you? Anyway, for our purposes, it's not so much a question of species or subspecies as morphine content. So you may not get Papaver somniferum, but you'll almost always get somniferant poppies... > > Hogshire > > suggests that boiling the straw for too long will decompose the morphine. > > I'm not sure if this is true, but better safe than sorry. > > Opium starts decomposing at high temps (> 70 degrees C.) But opium is not a compound. The Merck says that morphine decomposes at 254'C and morphine sulfate at 250'C. What in opium is it that decomposes? > >A spritz of lemon juice is nice. (Hogshire surmises > > that the citric acid in lemon juice may convert some morphine into heroin. > > No way. True, citric acid is basically three acetic acid molecules lumped > > together, but even pure glacial acetic acid reacts with morphine to form 3- > > and 6-monoacetylmorphine, not diacetylmorphine.) > > mais non, non, mein Freund, I am not the only one to surmise this. So > does Dean Lattimer, author of _Flowers in the Blood_. Also, forensics > journals have found the creation of "heroin" within opium that's been > mixed and heated with aspirin and or acetaminophen. Yeah I've seen that. Never looked up the articles, though. > Not a lot, but some. > I think anything with acetyl groups might do it under cranked up > conditions. Well, according to the Small & Lutz "bible" (_Chemistry of the Opium Alkaloids_, 1932), a mixture of 3- and 6-MAM is made by heating morphine in glacial acetic acid. In the original "discovery" by Wright, he describes putting it in glacial acetic acid and doing everything short of throwing things at it, and found only MAM's. I suppose a heroin molecule or two might show up. Actually, it doesn't matter, since the oral potency of heroin is about the same as that of morphine. But it still tastes better with lemon. > > Opium contains sulfate and meconate salts of of some 40 alkaloids. (If > > anyone has a Merck handy, could you tell me what the hell meconate/meconic > > acid is?) > > Where'd you get this sulfate biz? I'd had several cups when I wrote that, I thought I read it somewhere. I'm not sure, now. > meconic acid is "oxycheledonic acid" and it occurs in poppies. So far as > I know the meconic salt is the only form the alkaloids take. Unless > they're free-form. > > > Hard to say. Assuming 10% morphine and total extraction from each pod, and > > assuming an average of 80 mg opium per pod (the figure the DEA uses to > > estimate opium production capacity based on cultivated acreage), and > > assuming that each pod weighs about 1 gram -- do the math. > > Where'd this DEA figure come from? Sounds interesting. Ah. Go to your local Federal depository library (most medical libraries have a section) and pick up _Opium Poppy and Heroin Cultivation in Southeast Asia_ (1993) by the DEA (DEA-92004 is the GPO#). >I think they may > mean opium that's harvested fresh. When you're dealing with straw things > are different. First, because, technically there's no "opium" there > (justa passel o' alkaloids) and second because drying definitely reduces > the amount of alkaloids. That's true. They're talking about gum, but I needed a number. I think boiling the straw gives a better yield of what's in there, but then take into account the reduced amount, and, well... I'm also comparing to what I know of the subjective effects of pharmaceutical morphine, and 80 mg/10 pods feels about right. > > No. Though some would say it's in a gray area, it's really not. Poppy > > straw, which is what you have when you break up the heads and prepare them > > for opium extraction, > > Not to be nit-picky, but I went to jai and was looking at 10+ years > in prison over this shit and I've come to appreciate the value of precise > meanings. > > For the Record: poppy "straw" is defined as the head and the first 15-20 > cm of stem. The rest, I think, is called "stubble" and they feed it to > livestock.