Obtaining and cultivation Papaver Somniferum (aka opium poppies) from seed

fr0st_Byte · July 2010

Some people do not realize the same poppy seed that is on your bagel are the same seeds that opium poppies are grown from. Now you may wonder why I would post a thread about growing opium poppies if the seeds are virtually unobtainable. Well their not.

The same seeds that you see in your local grocery store for baking are opium seeds. The company that produces these seeds say they are sterile or heated enough as to not be able to germinate. This is true.

However in a small, regular size bottle of seeds in the spice section has probably (this is a way rough estimate) several thousand seeds.

Now this is the important part. There are so many seeds in the bottle that maybe 1 out of 300 will germinate. Trust me I've seen it and this guy who is not me has done it. Just place them in a very lightly damp paper towel. The towel cannot be too wet as the seeds are a food product and will rot rather quickly.

Don't bother trying to throw handfuls of seeds out onto the ground because as I previously stated they are a food product and ants and other hungry insects will carry them off and be eaten.

Well I have told you the important part if this thread has enough interest in it I will tell a few other secrets in proper plating and cultivation. Like taking your fresh home grown opium and using calcium sulfate and a few other chemicals to create a morphine base then if you want, turning that into the almighty diacetylmorphine AKA the big H word:D. Yes I said diamorphine. That's all for now kids, happy planting.

Btw- it is not illegal to posses, germinate, or plant these seeds. It is when you cut the poppy pod that a major law is broken. The last felony you want is manufacturing opium. The DE.A tends to frown on that a bit

BodilYFluidS · July 2010

what if i just wanna smoke some regular opium? i'm not tryin to make any of that hard stuff.

and no i don't want to buy it from someone lol, i'd rather just be patient and grow it myself.

reject · July 2010

A couple years ago I bought some dry poppy pods from ebay to make an awesome floral decoration, and cos I didn't need the seeds I just chucked them all in my garden.

4 months later in the summer, my garden was looking positively lovely.

zerozero · July 2010

This is very true. I think the easiest way to grow poppies would be to order some pods from a reputable source. The pods have quite a bit of usable, all-natural, un-tampered with seeds in them.

I don't think you can buy pods on e-bay anymore (although I haven't checked.) Luckily though, a buddy of mine gave me the business website of someone who used to sell pods on e-bay. PM me if you'd like a link. Also, like someone has already said, buying pods is completely legal, I believe it is the poppy straw that is illegal.

reject · July 2010

Aye they don't, but I still have the dudes website.

ManSlaughterr · July 2010

all you need is a razor blade and a pipe after a few weeks haha.

I have been interested in doing this for a while, however, never got around to it. would enjoy seeing someone else try though haha

isoterrapine · July 2010

I have grown poppies this year and am looking forwards to smoking some opium but just wanted to know how to get the best out of them.

BodilYFluidS · July 2010

me too

fr0st_Byte · July 2010

isoterrapine wrote: »

I have grown poppies this year and am looking forwards to smoking some opium but just wanted to know how to get the best out of them.

Very nice. You are sure you got the right seeds correct?

Thanks for the pics also.

isoterrapine · July 2010

99.5% sure they are the right seeds bought them from ebay as p.somnif and when the pods are cut they bleed

fr0st_Byte · July 2010

bump for new users

reject · July 2010

isoterrapine wrote: »

99.5% sure they are the right seeds bought them from ebay as p.somnif and when the pods are cut they bleed

All bleed when they're cut, no?

BungHole · July 2010

I highly recommend buying the seeds, which have been sold by the ethnobotanical vendors which BLTC has supported for years.

Although supermarket grade seeds can be viable, the germination rates are low. Any seeds that aren't viable will be dead and quite vulnerable to pathogens, which will quickly spread to live seeds. Not to mention the strongest ones that have survived that far will be seriously stunted.

Some brands, like McCormick(which seems to be rinsed and bad for seed tea) have high germination rates. Brands like Spice Island(which I have used successfully for making seed tea), usually give weak seedlings and a bunch of mold, if anything at all.

Buying horticulture grade seeds from a refutable vendor is worth it. So many seeds will sprout so fast, mold and other pathogens wont have a chance. You will have stronger specimens, more of them, and can choose their characteristics depending on the varieties sold by the vendor.

Strain can be very important as far as yield and quality of the opium. You have huge plants like giganteums which produce alot of latex in total, but not much in proportion to it's size. You have strains like Tasmanians that make alot of very potent latex per pod (Tasmanians are also nice because they are capable of growing multiple pods per plant). There's many more, including actual opium poppies(P. Somniferum....) bred to produce very low levels of morphine, but high levels of thebaine (which is very bad, unless you likez to chem

), which I'd say in most cases is worst than no alkaloids at all(unless, like I said, you likez to chem).

fr0st_Byte wrote: »

Some people do not realize the same poppy seed that is on your bagel are the same seeds that opium poppies are grown from. Now you may wonder why I would post a thread about growing opium poppies if the seeds are virtually unobtainable. Well their not.

The same seeds that you see in your local grocery store for baking are opium seeds. The company that produces these seeds say they are sterile or heated enough as to not be able to germinate. This is true.

However in a small, regular size bottle of seeds in the spice section has probably (this is a way rough estimate) several thousand seeds.

Now this is the important part. There are so many seeds in the bottle that maybe 1 out of 300 will germinate. Trust me I've seen it and this guy who is not me has done it. Just place them in a very lightly damp paper towel. The towel cannot be too wet as the seeds are a food product and will rot rather quickly.

Don't bother trying to throw handfuls of seeds out onto the ground because as I previously stated they are a food product and ants and other hungry insects will carry them off and be eaten.

Well I have told you the important part if this thread has enough interest in it I will tell a few other secrets in proper plating and cultivation. Like taking your fresh home grown opium and using calcium sulfate and a few other chemicals to create a morphine base then if you want, turning that into the almighty diacetylmorphine AKA the big H word:D. Yes I said diamorphine. That's all for now kids, happy planting.

Btw- it is not illegal to posses, germinate, or plant these seeds. It is when you cut the poppy pod that a major law is broken. The last felony you want is manufacturing opium. The DE.A tends to frown on that a bit

Gonna have to read up a little bit more on that, friend.;)

That's more my territory though probably, so I would feel obliged to help if necessary....

BungHole wrote:

My magical elf friend hasn't tried this yet, but he plans to when an order of pods come in which he already ordered a few days ago.

If you want the good shit (raw morphine freebase) do this:
Extract alkaloids with vinegar and rubbing alcohol ( I'd reccomend covering powdered pods with twice their volume of this mix). Filter.
Reduce volume by evaporation to something workable ( most likely just till all the alcohol is gone leaving a crude aqueous solution of alkaloidial acetates).
Add lime (garden lime or cement mixing grade or powdered chalked), filter.
Add an ammonium salt (make ammoinium acetate by dissolving non sudsy ammonia detergent with vinegar and boiling down to concentrated solution). Filter, rinse the gunk in the filter with distilled H2O.
Bam, morphine freebase.
Optional (makes morphine HCl):
Dissolve in hot alcohol.
Add muriatic acid/hydrochloric acid (not too much other wise it won't be, snortable/smokable/injectable, just a few drops per gram of M)
Throw in some activated charcoal, boil, filter, evaporate. This should be injection grade.

You want a crude salt somewhere between a tar and crystal, but most likely smokable?
Finely grind pods.
Put in three times it volume of vinegar.
Freeze in the freezer, then thaw. Repeat.
Filter, rinse the pod powder with some more vinegar, filter.
Cool/freeze the water till it's half liquid half ice(like a slushy, only waterier), filter and save the water.
Dry the aqueous solution (this can be done on a steam bath to speed it up, if not add rubbing alcohol to speed it up/keep microbes from growing in it and dry on a plate).

Hope this helps.

Poppies are the god of dreams!

BungHole wrote:

Well the first method is a hacked up method of how they make morphine freebase in the golden triangle.

There they do this; Dissolve opium in near boiling water (but not at boiling just near, like 80 degrees celsius), filter through cloth, they add cement grade lime, filter through cloth, then they add ammonium chloride and collect the precipitate.

The process of extracting morphine from opium involves dissolving opium in hot water, adding lime to precipitate the non-morphine alkaloids and then adding ammonium chloride to precipitate the morphine from the solution. An empty oil drum and some cooking pots are all that is needed.

The following is a step-by-step description of morphine extraction in a typical Southeast Asian laboratory:

1. An empty 55-gallon oil drum is placed on bricks about a foot above the ground and a fire is built under the drum. Thirty gallons of water are added to the drum and brought to a boil. Ten to fifteen kilograms of raw opium are added to the boiling water.

2. With stirring, the raw opium eventually dissolves in the boiling water, while soil, leaves, twigs, and other non-soluble materials float in the solution. Most of these materials are scooped out of the clear brown 'liquid opium' solution.

3. Slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), or more often a readily available chemical fertilizer with a high content of lime, is added to the solution. The lime converts the water insoluble morphine into the water soluble calcium morphenate. The other opium alkaloids do not react with the lime to form soluble calcium salts. Codeine is slightly water soluble and gets carried over with the calcium morphenate in the liquid. For the most part, the other alkaloids become part of the residual sediment 'sludge' that comes to rest on the bottom of the oil drum.

4. As the solution cools, and after the insolubles precipitate out, the morphine solution is scooped from the drum and poured through a filter of some kind. Burlap rice sacks are often used as filters. They are later squeezed in a press to remove most of the solution from the wet sacks. The solution is then poured into large cooking pots and re-heated, but not boiled.

5. Ammonium chloride is added to the heated calcium morphenate solution to adjust the alkalinity to a pH of 8 to 9, and the solution is then allowed to cool. Within one or two hours, the morphine base and the unextracted codeine base precipitate out of the solution and settle to the bottom of the cooking pot.

6. The solution is then poured off through cloth filters. Any solid morphine base chunks in the solution will remain on the cloth. The morphine base is removed from both the cooking pot and from the filter cloths, wrapped and squeezed in cloth, and then dried in the sun. When dry, the crude morphine base is a coffee-colored powder.

7. This 'crude' morphine base, commonly known by the Chinese term p'i-tzu throughout Southeast Asia, may be further purified by dissolving it in hydrochloric acid, adding activated charcoal, re-heating and re-filtering. The solution is filtered several more times, and the morphine (morphine hydrochloride) is then dried in the sun.

8. Morphine hydrochloride (still tainted with codeine hydrochloride) is usually formed into small brick-sized blocks in a press and wrapped in paper or cloth. The most common block size is 2 inches by 4 inches by 5 inches weighing about 1.3 kilograms (3 lbs). The bricks are then dried for transport to heroin processing laboratories.

From here, way down the page:http://opioids.com/jh/index.html

This method is only neccesary if you want to make H. If all you want is something resembling cooked flake opium, then just use the second method I said, it's fool proof, it's just a CWE.

PS: Avoiding the sulfate ion all together when choosing the reagents to alter the pH is quite necessary. If you understand phenolate salts, it's obvious why you can't use calcium sulfate. But if you use ammonium sulfate to precipitate the morphine freebase instead of the chloride or acetate, well, enjoy the shelac you now have mixed in with your morphine! Calcium sulfate will be quite water insoluble, like your freebase morphine. The process is called a redox reaction, and you must make sure as few of the byproducts as possible have similar solubilities to freebase morphine.

fr0st_Byte · July 2010

Ahh yes. I was trying to write that text file from memory but I see where I made the mistake on that chemical now.

Thanks for clearing that up.

BungHole · July 2010

fr0st_Byte wrote: »

Ahh yes. I was trying to write that text file from memory but I see where I made the mistake on that chemical now.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Yeah, good thing, cause if people decided the gamma-anhydrous calcium sulfate in plaster-of-paris would be a good OTC reagent, they'd be pretty pissed when it formed a solid block of calcium sulfate hemihydrate, trapping their goodies in a impenetrable brick of solid rock.:p

Gallows · July 2010

isoterrapine wrote: »

I have grown poppies this year and am looking forwards to smoking some opium but just wanted to know how to get the best out of them.

I have found that three vertical lances(per pod) in the evening is the best way to milk them. Let it dry a day or two and then scrape off with a razor and compile on wax paper. Be sure to space your lances out a bit, otherwise the liquid will drip back into the old cuts.

JustAnotherAsshole · July 2010

Don't just use the scraped opium, use the opium poppy straw (the dried stocks and stems of the plants) as well. You can boil the good stuff out of them and make it into a powerful tincture and shit like that. There's a guide on how to do that I saw some place, I'll post it if I find it.

EDIT: Here we are. http://forum.poppies.org/index.php?showtopic=10790

That's a guide for a tincture, but I imagine that you could stop short, dry and smoke the stuff off foil or something instead.

Obtaining and cultivation Papaver Somniferum (aka opium poppies) from seed

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