does anybody know for certain what kind of poppies are legal and wha kind are not in the us? i read in a past post that poppies are legal t grow as long as you dont go making heroin from them, but is tha definately true? i planted some poppy seeds, and it has been about four months. i thin that blooming time is near, and i dont want to get arrested. what i the deal with poppies
- agnatha314
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agnatha3141 writes in article dated Thu, 22 Apr 2004
20:55:36 GMT:Poppies are legal even here in the US (origin of the drug war). Seeds are legal too. In fact, George H.W. Bush failed a drug test when he was VP under Reagan because he had eaten a poppyseed bagel that day.
The actions to produce opium are pretty specific. You have to slice open the seed pod to make the plant produce a decent amount of latex. As long as you don't do that, you're in no danger of arrest.
-- spud_demon -at- thundermaker.net The above may not (yet) represent the opinions of my employer.
The only one is Oriental, but I grow them and nobody arrests me. Catalogs sell them everywhere
I am constantly amazed at the amount of misinformation that gets disseminated through this group.
Oriental poppies (Papaver orientalis) are NOT illegal to own or grow and are not the source of opium. Papaver somniferum, aka the breadseed, sleep, peony-flowered or opium poppy IS illegal, but enforcement is, at the best, sporadic and half-hearted. The seeds are very commonly sold by a number of seed supply houses and are routinely included in wildflower seed mixes, poppy starts are frequently found in nurserires and someone somewhere is growing them in bulk, otherwise there would be no poppyseed pastries and bagels.
Since I read somewhere that it takes like an acre or more to produce any measurable quantity of opium (just a recollection - don't quote as fact), growing a few plants in your garden will hardly be considered the next major crime wave and hopefully the police and DEA have more important issues to attend to.
I have heard of plants being removed from gardens - whether by the authorities or kids experimenting was never clear - but I have never heard of anyone arrested for growing a few of them in a garden setting.
pam - gardengal
dated Thu, 22 Apr 2004
20:55:36 GMT:. In fact, George H.W. Bush failed a drug test when he was VP
Do you have a citation for this? It sounds like an urban legend to me.
Thanks for the attack. I wouldn't expect that from you to me.
I meant P. somniferum. Sorry. I won't do that again.
my name is pam too. just felt like saying that. about half of the ones i am growing are the illegal kind. i just foun out. p. somniferum. v. persian white. i am soon going to move t another houselhold and planted a full garden, of which most of th stuff is blooming already or about to. the poppies however are not, an now that i know that they are illegal, i am wondering if i will get t see them bloom before i move in september, and have to rip them out s that the next tenants dont get in a heap of trouble. they are currentl about six inches tall with about twenty leaves or so each. i plante them in febuary. i live in florida, and they get a lot of sun. doe anyone have any experience with these, and might be able to tell me ho long it takes for them to bloom? i know that the other poppies planted, the california one, will take a full year, meaning that i wil not see them bloom. :
- agnatha314
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Quite right! Though I trust you're not leaving out your own ability to disseminate misinformation, as you do it as readily as Escapee or any of us! As for example:
Papaver somniferum is legal in the majority of countries, including the United States; some of the few countries that ban them do so because they are noxious weeds or could displace native poppies (they're illegal to propogate in Finland & Norway). In the USA, what the purchaser does with the poppies is what defines legality or illegality. As ornamentals, legal. To attempt to extract alkaloids for use as a drug, illegal, even though opium poppies grown in temperate climates do not develop noticeable amounts of these alkaloids. To sell them with instructions on how to make laudenum, illegal -- though you can SEPARATELY sell a book about how to make laudenum thanks to freedom of the press. There are many American companies that specilize in providing seeds, plants, extracts, & powders of legal herbal intoxicants, & also sell books & pamphlets on how to use them, always with the disclaimer not to do that, or this information is for historical or ethnobotanical interest only. They skirt the law in ways the seed companies do not, as the myriad seed companies know they're selling opium poppies to innocuous gardeners who'd be surprised how many of the things they plant could get them high.
If Papaer somniferum was illegal in the US, hundreds of above-board nurseries wouldn't be selling it, nor a couple dozen other potentially hallucinogenic plants, many of which require far less preparation to get high with. We live under a government that puts people in prison for selling bongs for crine out loud, because laws against interstate sales of bongs DO exist, & enforcement is pretty nasty. If the poppies were illegal, policing agencies wouldn't be going "Oh who cares about that, we're not enforcing it!" Rather, nurseries & our personal gardens would be raided every day to root out the Evil Weed, & nosy neighbors who never liked you or your yappy dog would have you hauled off for growing the Wrong Flowers, just for the fun of seeing you go to jail.
Temperate-grown opium poppies are not even as potently psychoactive as are morning glory seeds. The law fortunately realized long ago that attempting to regulate moderately hallucinogenic plants was a lost cause, or even cinnamen & nutmeg would end up banned from the kitchen cabinets, as would be hundreds of everyday garden plants, & half of southern california would have to be agent-oranged to death in order to get rid of jimson & a hundred other native plants.
So it is the use that is legislated rather than the species. Likewise it is illegal to buy & sell monkshoods for medicinal purposes, but you can still buy monkshoods; & it's illegal to buy or sell daffodils for the purpose of removing the germination to get stoned, but daffodils are otherwise legal, just like morning glories & poppies.
One rather famous case of this happening in Mount Baker, Seattle, to a H'mong family, resulted in the police department making a public apology to the whole H'mong community for having profiled H'mongs as from the Golden Triangle. The police apologized not only because the poppies would've been legal even if they HAD been Papaver somniferum, but in this case a lone officer had taken it upon his own authority to tramp through a garden to pull up the "evidence" -- thereby destroying an elderly woman's ocra patch.
-paggers
A friend used hers for home-made laudenum. The potency was doubtful since she grew the poppies in Seattle & it's the wrong sort of climate to develop the opiating alkaloids, gorgeous though her poppy garden was. But since laudenum is mostly alcohol anyway, she got roaring drunk on it at times, & swore it was a better experience than being drunk on wine or brandy. I for a while planned to get drunk a few times with her, as laudenum is what most of the major & greatest opium-addict authors were doing, as opposed to smoking it pure, so they were drunkards as much as opium addicts. Since the classic opium authors are so excellent I wanted to do laudenum out of admiration for their art. But being a teetotlar, it was just too big a decision to decide to drink anything at all, & the more research I did about it the less wise it seemed to be. It helps to be stupid about things if you wanna be an addict, or you're bound to change your mind.
-paghat the ratgirl
"Pam - gardengal" expounded:
Yes, they are illegal to grow around here, a few years back there was quite a story in the local paper about the police raiding peoples' gardens (one woman over in Scituate was actually arrested, at 86 years old, and I have her plants growing in my yard). I think it was an overzealous sherriff or something who decided to come down hard on all us opium-growing gardeners ;->. Didn't get anywhere, the courts threw out the cases, and they've left us alone since then. But rest assured, it is illegal to grow opium poppies, they posted the applicable laws and I have the clippings around here, somewhere.
Legally, no. It is illegal to grow Papaver somniferum (breadseed poppy, opium poppy). 'though it *is* legal to buy or sell the seeds. Go figure. That being said, the chances of any gardener being swooped down upon by the DEA for growing pretty flowers are infinitessimally small. These flowers are regularly grown all over the country with no problem whatsoever.
snipped-for-privacy@aol.comspamfree (Zemedelec) expounded:
Who knows? They aren't very rabid about them, I know, I've had them out in my front garden right on the street for years. Every once in awhile some badge-heavy decides to go on a rampage and it hits the paper. I've got datura, for that matter, right out there, too. :::shrug:::
I believe we aren't allowed to grow P. somniferum in bulk, even for culinary use. Seeds in bulk (for spice sellers and bakers) are imported.
I grew them from seed one year and they bloomed mid-summerish, as I recall.
Please find the clipping quick! And where exactly is "around here"? If you live on Malta, yep, they're illegal even as garden ornmentals!
US FEDERAL law makes it legal to rip up gardens in this manner on the mere suspicion of illegal intent, but without proof of illegal intent, there are no actual cases that can ever come to court; & local police wasting enforcement time & money harrassing people for legal plants would probably cause a few heads to roll, & it wouldn't be any gardener's head.
What you describe is perfectly plausible by the existing federal law. Over-enthusiastic law enforcement is backed up by a law that permits such enthusiasiam on the basis of suspicions alone, & suspicion is a hard thing to quantify since it's in the mind of the enforcer. But no actual cases can result for the courtroom in the absence of misuse, for no law is broken. If it were just generally illegal to grow them, rest assured, it wouldn've gotten somewhere.
-paghat the ratgirl
I don't know about GW, but when I was in the Army, I was specifically warned against eating food poppy seeds because it gave a positive on the random drug tests.
See:
I still cannot believe not even as much as an apology to me. Hmm, I thought you were different. Guess not.
Oh, I don't know. What about all the seat belt laws and helmet laws? I think legislators just like to legislate. It doesn't have to make sense.
"tmtresh" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:
if you are taxpayer and have to pay for enforcement or put up with any of fallout (e.g. overzealous people looking for their superhero costume in an okra patch), it should make sense. and when it doesn't, people will usually just let it slide, because there's really nothing you can do about it.
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