Power of the Poppy

[packman]

It is a beautiful, hardy flower, Papaver somniferum, a poppy that grows up to four feet in height and arrives in a multitude of colors. It thrives in temperate climates, needs no fertilizer, attracts few pests, and is as tough as many weeds. The blooms last only a few days and then the petals fall, revealing a matte, greenish-gray pod fringed with flutes. The seeds are nutritious and have no psychotropic effects. No one knows when the first curious human learned to crush this bulblike pod and mix it with water, creating a substance that has an oddly calming and euphoric effect on the human brain. Nor do we know who first found out that if you cut the pod with a small knife, capture its milky sap, and leave that to harden in the air, you’ll get a smokable nugget that provides an even more intense experience. We do know, from Neolithic ruins in Europe, that the cultivation of this plant goes back as far as 6,000 years, probably farther. Homer called it a “wondrous substance.” Those who consumed it, he marveled, “did not shed a tear all day long, even if their mother or father had died, even if a brother or beloved son was killed before their own eyes.” For millennia, it has salved pain, suspended grief, and seduced humans with its intimations of the divine. It was a medicine before there was such a thing as medicine. Every attempt to banish it, destroy it, or prohibit it has failed.


No other developed country is as devoted to the poppy as America. We consume 99 percent of the world’s hydrocodone and 81 percent of its oxycodone. We use an estimated 30 times more opioids than is medically necessary for a population our size. And this love affair has been with us from the start. The drug was ubiquitous among both the British and American forces in the War of Independence as an indispensable medicine for the pain of battlefield injuries. Thomas Jefferson planted poppies at Monticello, and they became part of the place’s legend (until the DEA raided his garden in 1987 and tore them out of the ground). Benjamin Franklin was reputed to be an addict in later life, as many were at the time.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/americas-opioid-epidemic.html

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

1. Poppies at the Tower of London

[Crunchy Frog]

2. Wrong kind of poppy. Those and the one in the OP.

Those are Flanders poppies, used to commemorate war dead, particularly WWI. No psychoactive alkaloids.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

3. Correct, but, ...

... although the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) has the highest concentration of narcotics, all poppies in the Papaver genus (including Papaver rhoeas, Flanders or Common Poppy) do contain some amount of narcotic.

"... they shall grow not old,
as we that are left grow old, ..."
--- Binyon, For the Fallen