In article jj9ic.8032$0u6.1529055@attbi_s03, "Pam - gardengal"
wrote:

"escapee" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 20:55:36 GMT, agnatha3141
opined:

does anybody know for certain what kind of poppies are legal and what
kind are not in the us? i read in a past post that poppies are legal to
grow as long as you dont go making heroin from them, but is that
definately true?
i planted some poppy seeds, and it has been about four months. i think
that blooming time is near, and i dont want to get arrested. what is
the deal with poppies?

The only one is Oriental, but I grow them and nobody arrests me. Catalogs
sell them everywhere

I am constantly amazed at the amount of misinformation that gets
disseminated through this group.

Quite right! Though I trust you're not leaving out your own ability to
disseminate misinformation, as you do it as readily as Escapee or any of
us! As for example:

Papaver somniferum, aka the breadseed, sleep,
peony-flowered or opium poppy IS illegal, but enforcement is, at the best,
sporadic and half-hearted.

Papaver somniferum is legal in the majority of countries, including the
United States; some of the few countries that ban them do so because they
are noxious weeds or could displace native poppies (they're illegal to
propogate in Finland & Norway). In the USA, what the purchaser does with
the poppies is what defines legality or illegality. As ornamentals,
legal. To attempt to extract alkaloids for use as a drug, illegal, even
though opium poppies grown in temperate climates do not develop noticeable
amounts of these alkaloids. To sell them with instructions on how to make
laudenum, illegal -- though you can SEPARATELY sell a book about how to
make laudenum thanks to freedom of the press. There are many American
companies that specilize in providing seeds, plants, extracts, & powders
of legal herbal intoxicants, & also sell books & pamphlets on how to use
them, always with the disclaimer not to do that, or this information is
for historical or ethnobotanical interest only. They skirt the law in ways
the seed companies do not, as the myriad seed companies know they're
selling opium poppies to innocuous gardeners who'd be surprised how many
of the things they plant could get them high.

If Papaer somniferum was illegal in the US, hundreds of above-board
nurseries wouldn't be selling it, nor a couple dozen other potentially
hallucinogenic plants, many of which require far less preparation to get
high with. We live under a government that puts people in prison for
selling bongs for crine out loud, because laws against interstate sales of
bongs DO exist, & enforcement is pretty nasty. If the poppies were
illegal, policing agencies wouldn't be going "Oh who cares about that,
we're not enforcing it!" Rather, nurseries & our personal gardens would be
raided every day to root out the Evil Weed, & nosy neighbors who never
liked you or your yappy dog would have you hauled off for growing the
Wrong Flowers, just for the fun of seeing you go to jail.

Temperate-grown opium poppies are not even as potently psychoactive as are
morning glory seeds. The law fortunately realized long ago that attempting
to regulate moderately hallucinogenic plants was a lost cause, or even
cinnamen & nutmeg would end up banned from the kitchen cabinets, as would
be hundreds of everyday garden plants, & half of southern california would
have to be agent-oranged to death in order to get rid of jimson & a
hundred other native plants.

So it is the use that is legislated rather than the species. Likewise it
is illegal to buy & sell monkshoods for medicinal purposes, but you can
still buy monkshoods; & it's illegal to buy or sell daffodils for the
purpose of removing the germination to get stoned, but daffodils are
otherwise legal, just like morning glories & poppies.

I have heard of plants being removed from gardens -

One rather famous case of this happening in Mount Baker, Seattle, to a
H'mong family, resulted in the police department making a public apology
to the whole H'mong community for having profiled H'mongs as from the
Golden Triangle. The police apologized not only because the poppies
would've been legal even if they HAD been Papaver somniferum, but in this
case a lone officer had taken it upon his own authority to tramp through a
garden to pull up the "evidence" -- thereby destroying an elderly woman's
ocra patch.

-paggers

whether by the
authorities or kids experimenting was never clear - but I have never heard
of anyone arrested for growing a few of them in a garden setting.

pam - gardengal

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/