How come that I never hear of farmers in the U.S.A . or Europe growing opium poppies ? On the side a course .

Maybe they try to keep it a secret or something.

Maybe you’re not reading the right magazines.

It would take up too much space & labor. Also, the climate is not perfect.

Now stop asking all the drug questions.

I grow a lot of opium poppies. You don’t need a very specialized climate, and the “labor” is as follows: throw seeds on the ground and wait two months; after that they’ll self-sow. I grow them for their looks – they’re incredibly beautiful.
I make a sedative tea out of the ground-up dried hulls. The seeds themselves can’t get anyone high. I guess that’s the rationale for the fact that it’s illegal to grow eight or nine opium poppies in your flower garden, but legal to grow great fields of them if you’re an incorporated seed company and then sell packets of seed to private citizens who aren’t allowed to grow the flowers. Yay America!

It’s illegal. There are poppies that you ban get at garden centers but they aren’t the kind you make drugs from.

Learned something new about susanc today.

The “labor” is in harvesting the opium from the seed pod, once it has turned color and is ready. It is a labor-intensive process that only yeilds a small amount of opium per plant.

Susanc, in spite of her disclamer, does live in a special climate. The blackberries in Olympia, WA are the size of lemons and the roses as big as dinner plates. There is a lot of moisture in the air (they call it “rain’ out there) and a fairly temperate climate most of the time.

@Jess, you can easily get opium poppy seeds at garden centers and even at many grocery stores. They aren’t lableled “opium poppies”, but if they print the botanical name on the packet (and they may not) you will see that they are called papaver somniferum, sleep poppy, get it? You can also get Shirley poppy seeds, California poppy seeds, Icelandic poppy seeds at the garden center. All of them are really pretty, but none of them will do anything for you except decorate your yard.
The opium poppy is a self-seeding annual. You can also buy a beautiful perennial poppy which has no pharmacological properties. This comes in a flowerpot, not a seed packet, and is easy to notice because it’s usually sold when in bloom.
@cherry: harvesting the raw opium is labor-intensive, as you say. You have to slit the seedpods, wait for the latexlike substance to ooze out, and scrape it off. It takes a lot of poppy to get enough to make it worthwhile; to make heroin out of the opium, you have to cook it or something (I wouldn’t know, I’m a weenie). For my “soothing tea”, all you have to do is wait for the seedpods to dry, shake out the seed (into a flowerbed, perhaps), and grind them up in a coffee grinder. Store in an airtight Mason jar for when a friend has a headache or a heartache.
@gail: you ratted me out!! O no, here’s the DEA at the door now!! Quick, hide
the Mason jar!!!

@susanc- I will have to check that out. I use to grow them at my old house and they didn’t do very good. They were the already potted ones from Lowes.

Just grow catnip (Nepenta), dry and smoke it. Much less labor-intensive.

No, don’t smoke anything. Make an infusion. An infusion (or perhaps a nice Special Brownie) will not give you lung cancer.
Did you read about third-hand smoke? See it on the news? Now they tell us even stuck-to-clothing particles of smoke of any kind will mess up your lungs. Ow.