Nicomorphinist
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2019
- Messages
- 1,401
What's your method of extraction? Taste still seems the clearest way to gauge, though i cant tell you offhand the relative bitterness of thebaine to morphine.
FYI to the OP, from the quantification studies, some of the stongest batches yielded 3mg of morphine per gram on extraction (albiet heated/acid extraction), meaning 80g could yeild 240mg of morphine, which may be a fatal dose on a small, non-tolerant individual. Thus out of an abundance of caution, in the odd event you have an exceptionally potent batch, even 80g may be too much to start off at...
I mix seeds in a bucket with a whisk for 2-5 minutes. These days it is to get the papaverine to make sure my mojo is in working order even with rather high doses of narcotics.
And for research, of course. I try to get as many different types of poppy seed as possible; the GC/MS and other chromatographic tests I did on Tuesday on an alcoholic extract of pods which I picked right in the field near the Austro-Czech border pointed to the latex in that poppyhead being almost 40 per cent morphine, so following up on that is my project for the week-end. The farmer tells me he uses seeds from the previous years' crop to seed each year, so this appears to have occurred naturally, or something escaped from a lab in the guts of a bird or something . . .
The taste of the seed or pod extract and the colour have been a good guide, but I have been trying to see if, for example, a given colour of the extract can be plugged into a formula to get the mg/ml of morphine in the solution, the trouble being that codeine, noscapine, and thebaine can fluctuate from one batch to another by an order of magnitude or more.
Some firms try washing, others know not to, so there is probably a 1000-fold possible differential in morphine content in the seeds.
When I have done this in the US of late, the last time I was there, I took to inspecting the seeds before purchase and looking for pieces of the seed capsule comingled therewith. There are going to be vendors who, to the outrage of their accounting departments and end users, are actually going to wash the seeds to appease the government and that redneck clown ignoramus Bolshevik Senator from Arkansas I think it is. At a bare minimum, washed seeds are useless for cooking as they don't taste like anything -- save the drama and get some aquarium gravel if you need texture in your dish . . .
Meanwhile, the best-tasting seeds are the almost pitch black ones which come from the high-morphine cultivars grown commercially in Tasmania, very possibly three to five times as much morphine as wild growing Papaver somniferum Linnaeus 1762. The seeds of the high-thebaine and high-oripavine cultivars which make very little morphine look much different and taste abominable, so they are not widely marketed if at all for culinary use, and washing the seeds in the first place means potentially pretty high scrap percentages, enough to make any self-respecting Production & Inventory Control specialist apoplectic, because wet seeds can become inedible within an hour depending on the ambient temperature.
The dirty little secret is that the opium is what makes the seeds taste good
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