Opium Poppy
Papaver somniferum
It offers sleep. What sleep offers is another matter.
Overview
The opium poppy is one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world, and the source of morphine, codeine, heroin, and most of the opioid pharmacopeia that has shaped medicine — and addiction — for two centuries. The plant itself is not dangerous to grow or handle; the latex that bleeds from scored unripe seed capsules is the source of all the alkaloids, and the dried seeds contain negligible opiates and are edible. Its cultivation is legal in the UK for ornamental purposes, restricted in the United States, and the subject of regulations that vary widely by jurisdiction. What is constant, across thousands of years, is the poppy's association with sleep, with forgetting, and with the dead.
Botanical Notes
A tall annual reaching 80–120cm with smooth, blue-grey, waxy stems and clasping, lobed, grey-green leaves. Large flowers of white, pink, red, or purple, often with dark basal marks, opening from nodding buds to flat, papery blooms June to August. Distinctive round, glaucous seed capsule with a corona of rays at the top — the structure from which opium latex is scored. Self-seeds readily. Native to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East; cultivated worldwide for over 8,000 years. The alkaloids — morphine, codeine, thebaine — occur in the latex of the unripe capsule.
Lore & History
The Sumerians called it hul gil, the joy plant, and cultivated it from at least 3400 BC. In ancient Greece it was sacred to Hypnos (sleep), Thanatos (death), and Demeter — the goddess who, in her grief for Persephone, accepted the poppy's gift of numbness and forgetting. The Victorians drank laudanum — opium dissolved in alcohol — as casually as aspirin; it was sold over the counter, prescribed for everything from toothache to women's nerves, and quietly destroyed a significant fraction of its users. Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" — written in an opium reverie — are the literary monuments of a complicated era. Field poppies on war memorials are Papaver rhoeas, not somniferum, but the confusion is not entirely accidental.
Warnings
The plant is safe to grow ornamentally in most jurisdictions; check local law before cultivating. Do not score the seed capsules to extract latex — this is the line between ornamental cultivation and controlled drug production. The dried seeds are edible and used in baking; seed pod tea contains sufficient opiates to cause dependency and is not safe. Opioid alkaloids in any form carry serious addiction risk. Poppy seed consumption can cause positive opiate drug test results.