so, your dear friend and humble narrator stumbled upon an enormous poppy field the end of which i am yet to determine.

and 2 days later, 2 more...

but poppy tea isn't exactly what we're after here, the 20+ alks give me a bit of a dirty feeling, not to mention the constipation from hell...
fuck, first time i had a bowel movement today, in 3 days, with massive blood loss and i can't sit properly the whole day.

so!

how does this general outline procedure sound:

soak the pulverized pods in hot water and some citric acid overnight, do this thrice, filter, add calcium oxide, precipitate with ammonium chloride, filter morphine base.

more or less..?

Your general procedure follows guidelines well. Keep working on making these posts timeless, impersonal. And our bubble is right to point out the many guides and books dedicated to this topic.

What sort of weight is generally considered worth extracting? Fresh or dry, that is?

This particular amphibian elder deity is pondering what a purified propionyl-kompot might be like via IV.

Just starting from opium sounds to him like a bit of a waste really, considering that if only the latex is tapped and the pods thrown, there is still a bunch of alkaloid material beeing tossed out. Considering what the bioavailability of morphine is per os (oral morphine has a really piss poor bioavailability), and Toady is pretty tolerant, beeing a chronic pain patient, a liter of pod tea, even brewed from pods that have not been cultivated for morphine, using no particularly high yielding cultivar, in the english climate, hell, without even any fertilizer, that is still enough to get him nodding, using a pan full of sliced up fresh pods.

                           

Real poppy seeds from an opium grower? Do poppy seeds for medicinal opium count too? I used to get those so-called "grey-poppy" (opposed to the so called blue poppy which is mainly used for cakes and rolls) from austrian friends where it is grown in fields in graubünden like in they do in tasmania.
Those are really potent and high yielding, and the reason poppys are grown in mild climates like tasmania or europe where it is native, are that it has the highest opiate content there. Too bad they are "extinct". 

i meant the plants in my garden grown from these austrian medicinal opium strain  those are "extinct" after i used every single pod expecting there were enough seeds on the soil, that they will show up next year again. Wrong...
But they grow here also wild, and in these typical allotments, everywhere in such huge amounts its hilarious.
Papaver somniferum is listed in our drug laws here specific as living plant as are coca, hemp ,diviners sage and the thebaine poppy too, and are forbidden in every part except seeds for food use.
Still they could be considered as native plant so common are they

"Do poppy seeds for medicinal opium count too?"

Yes . The people in india and thailand dont realy breed . They have natural potent strains ....... and might take seeds from better fields but dont check individual plants and cross the strongest and bigest producing . The strains that are grown for medicinal opium are naturaly potent plants that have been made stronger because they have been bread for potency by people with very much knowledge of breeding .

I had a read ---->

"Influence of the conditions under wich the poppy is grown on the alkaloid content of the opium obtained" By T.N.Hinskaya and M.G.Yosilova

and

"The part played by fertilizers in increasing opium poppy yields" By V.V.Sheberstov

In the united nations "Bulletin on narcotics" Vol.VIII No. 3 July - september 1956

and saw that i had forgoten fertilizer . It makes a BIG difference in the growth and the content . Plants that had been fertilised produced up to twice as much opium as plants that hadnt been fertilised .

In thailand i didnt see any fertilizer or empty recycled fertiliser sacks . <------- They couldnt have aforded it anyway .

Another thing is that there are two sorts of opium and the one is much stronger than the other . Raw opium is in my experience light brown to dark brown and soft and stickey and ( De-fatted water extracted ) opium is black and hard like a stone when its cold and not stickey . I wouldnt take raw opium as i find it boring . IF a person has had morphine or heroin i think that they would be disapointed if they took opium . I had 80 pipes in my first night with an opium adict opium grower and it wasnt enough for me .

EDIT - I`ve also had legal standardised medical opium tinktur , heroin and morphine from pharmacys a lot of times and in comparison ...... for me .... the opium was not realy worth it but better than nothing .

Probably too late to plant a crop now, but in the coming year...

Wrong.
Sow them in late summer, the plants that grow but not flower in one year have to overwinter with a already well developed root system so they are able to start from a point seedlings will never reach. IIRC medicinal opium fields where it gets cold enough like in austria do it this way because it will give plants will sometimes way over 100 pods, and i have personally myself seen a plant with at least this number of pods, but it was a bit over 2 meters high! For the us guys, seven feet.
Your climate is the right one for such beautys, sow them just now its the right time for the best poppys!


Edit: Dear moderator wasps, this thread goes into some kind of biological discussion, isnt it better placed in the garden section maybe? Could it bee moved then please?

High Toad God ,

The nostalgia bit ----->

"They at least used to sell opium tincture here in the UK over the counter, although not sure if they still do, not bad stuff at all."

Yep me 3 . I remember buying cough mixture from chemists that had globs of opium in it ........ i think that the last time was in about 1974 . Another thing was kaolin and morphine from a vets for dogs with the shits . They had it in about 10 liter bottles just lieing around on shelves in the surgery . I also remember that it was possible to go to a doctors and tell him "I`m adicted to XXXX" and he would prescribe it without doing a blood test . A lot of me mates were either on heroin or dextroamphetamine wich they then sold in "The cavern" , "Wigan casino" and "The catacombs" . I was getting barbs  =  a few plus a few pints of beer worked wonders .


The opinion bit ---->

I like the idea of crossing them to try to get bigger pods / more yield .


The facts bit  ---->

"How much difference does fertilizer make to the yield from P.somniferum pods, as a rough % ?"

The tests were done between 1932 and 1948 . Some of the tests were done with manure ( I take it they mean cow shit ? ) , some with superphosphates and one with slag(?) . Some fluctuations come from the weather .

The yield of morphine with no fertilisation ranged from 7.1 to 12.9 %

In the 7.1 % test the best yield with fertiliser was 7.9 %

In the 12.9 test the best yield with fertilizer was 11.58 ( that was the test useing slag ) .

The best yields of morphine with fertilisation ranged from 7.84 to 13.36

In the 7.84 % test the yield with no fertiliser was 9.64 %

In the 13.36 % test the yield with no fertilizer was 12.31 %

The conclusions were that the ground should be watered before ploughing and phosphates added . Then a watering when the seeds are planted and a little bit of phosphates . After they start to grow they are watered twice and given a nitrogen fertiliser twice . After they started building buds no more fertilizer or water was given .

The poppys need for fertilization dureing the initial stages of development is not uniform .
Dureing the initial stages of developement they need a heavy phosphate feeding and very little nitrogen .
The plants need insignificant amounts of potash .

60 - 90 kg/ha P2O5 at ploughing .
6 kg/ha granulated superphosphate at sewing .
40 - 60 kg/ha at the "rosette" stage .


Tthat looks confuseing to me ........ If you want i next time i can get out i can try to scan the report and beam you a copy over ?

That would bee much appreciated TLS.

And it wasn't THAT long ago since Tsathoggua got hold of some gee's linctus, not seen it this year, but THINK so last year, can't remember for sure. (damn NHS offers absolutely ZERO help, denied him at every turn while trying to get help for his memory impairment), definitely the year before last though it was available.

There is quite the selection available in this country. Toady finds it a bit strange that one can't buy anything stronger than 8/500mg co-codamol or the DHC equivalent of the same for treating pain, but there are the following available: 600mg/200ml bottle of codeine syrup, and another one with +1mg per 5ml on top of that, although with white pine oil, this stuff really doesn't agree with Toady's insides though. gee's linctus, the opium tincture. Kaolin&morphine, not sure how much is in each bottle, pulmo bailly cough mixture, 7mg codeine per 5ml, tastes awful, stinks to high heaven and a 20mg morphine per 100ml bottle remedy for upset stomachs and the craps.

Most of them though are getting hard to find. Only the pulmo bailly one seems to be kept out on actual display, and codeine linctus is REALLY hard to find these days, it is still sold, but most pharmacies don't carry it at all, and IIRC its some sort of regulatory thing that one can only buy 1 bottle at a time of any of those sorts of products, although one finds the odd person that will sell 2 at a time now and then.

As for barbs, Only one toady has tried is barbital (veronal) the very first of them. Liked it, but it got hold of him at the time, got physically dependent, and then the pigs nicked him after he ODed at home, and paramedics grassed him up. The withdrawals nearly killed him.

Thanks for the tip about cooling them Electro.