Opium Poppy – The Fight for Botanicals

May 16, 2018May 30, 2018

Myanmar Embraces Silkworms Over Poppies

Zhou Xing Ci’s family have farmed poppies for as long as anyone remembers, scraping the flowers’ sticky brown sap to produce opium.

Along with many other farmers in the hills of eastern Myanmar, the crop – much of which ends up as heroin sold on foreign streets – has in recent years put Myanmar behind only Afghanistan as the world’s leading source of opium.

A Chinese company working with farmers like Zhou hopes the silk-producing larva can help the farmers, and their country, quit the drug.

“Growing opium is too tough. It’s only one harvest every year and a rain can easily destroy a whole year’s work,” said Zhou.

The UN agency has assisted more than 1,000 farmers to switch from opium to another cash crop, coffee, since 2014, said Troels Vester, UNODC country manager for Myanmar.

Still, 41,000 hectares of poppy was planted in Myanmar last year, the agency said. Farmers in conflict areas were less likely to have moved to licit crops, it added.

In the corner of Myanmar where Zhou lives, bordering China’s Yunnan province, various armed groups operate and the law is barely enforced, providing a haven for opium traders, as well as heroin producers and meth-lab operators.

Home Brewed Death Tea

Poppy seed tea has potentially lethal consequences according to a new paper published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Researchers at Sam Houston State University decided to look into home-brewed poppy seed tea and its lethality.

Deaths attributable to opioids have quadrupled since 1999 and account for the six out of every ten overdose deaths. Whereas heroin and opiate-containing medications have been the primary source of addictions and deaths, it seems that brewing tea from unwashed poppy seeds can also kill.

The opium poppy plant (Papaver somniferum) has been cultivated for centuries as a source of opium. Poppy seeds produced from the poppy plant produce a milky sap containing opiates. Poppy seed tea is made by washing or soaking the seeds in water. Opium is contained within the seed capsule and also contains a variable mixture of alkaloids, including roughly ten percent morphine, 6 percent noscapine, one percent papaverine, 0.5 percent codeine and 0.2 percent thebaine.

How lethal ingestion of opiates can depend on individual tolerance which develops rapidly with long-term use. As the authors of the study point out, “The level of information that is shared online contributes to the facilitation of drug abuse practices such as extracting opium alkaloids by brewing poppy seed tea,” and they add, “However, this practice can have fatal consequences.”

Professor Madeleine Swortwood, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forensic Science at Sam Houston State University, was contacted by the parent of a young man who died after drinking home-brewed PST.

June 27, 2017July 26, 2017

Wa Declare Poppy-Free Zone

The United Wa State Army (UWSA) claimed opium poppy fields have now been completely eradicated from the southern area of the Wa Self-Administered Division bordering Thailand, as it incinerated seized drugs to mark the UN’s international day against drug abuse on Monday.

According to the commander, a total of 2.7 million methamphetamine tablets, four kilograms of heroin, and 14 kilograms of raw opium were seized by the UWSA anti-narcotics squad between January 2014 and June 2017. Thirty drug dealers and 60 drug users were arrested over the same time period by the narcotics squad.

UWSA began controlling opium poppy growing in 1996 and adopted policies to combat the production of drugs in 2005.

In 2000, UWSA relocated residents living in the southern part of Wa Self-Administered Division to the northern part, and also relocated those from northern part to southern part to grow substitute crops, said the commander.

Click here for more info: The Irrawaddy

June 12, 2017July 11, 2017

Massive Poppy Bust: Why Home-Grown Opium Is Rare

A North Carolina man was arrested last month when police discovered an acre of opium poppies growing in his yard.

The alleged grower, Cody Xiong, faces a rare charge in the United States. Despite a raging opioid epidemic in the country, fields of home-grown opium are rare. The sheriff in the North Carolina case said the discovery was only the second time the plant had been found growing in the United States this year, WBTV reported.

There are two big reasons for this lack of agricultural entrepreneurship: effective U.S. law enforcement and the ease of importing heroin made from opium poppies grown elsewhere, said H. Douglas Wankel, a former assistant administrator and chief of operations in the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

“It’s very labor-intensive,” Wankel told Live Science.

Massive Poppy Bust: Why Home-Grown Opium Is Rare

A North Carolina man was arrested last month when police discovered an acre of opium poppies growing in his yard.

The alleged grower, Cody Xiong, is a rare criminal in the United States. Despite a raging opioid epidemic in the country, fields of home-grown opium are rare. The sheriff in the North Carolina case said the discovery was only the second time the plant had been found growing in the United States this year, WBTV reported.

Growing enough poppies to make heroin in the United States doesn’t make much economic sense compared to importing the drug from more lawless regions, Wankel said. Compared to marijuana, opium poppies are more conspicuous and harder to process, and carry much harsher penalties for growing.