I think in many jurisdictions, all the law would have to do is prove you knew there was morphine or another narcotic present in your poppies, or intended to attmept to extract morphine, or even marketed the plants in any form with the understanding that morphine was present. ...
Well, no, not really, now that I see you've used the word morphine over and over and over again. It's not about anything containing morphine unless you're extracting the alkaloids and then trying to separate the morphine from all the others, which is not easy BTW. And of course any kind of manufacturing activity to create a product for distribution and sale is in a different category than this thread where people are talking about making a tea out of pods for themselves and maybe having a communal experience with a few friends. US drug law bans the simple possession of any part (except the seeds and roots) of the plant named papaver somniferum lactatum in federal drug law.
Anyone interested in poppy tea and the quirks of US law on it ought to learn what happened to Jim Hogshire a very few years after publishing his book
Opium for the Masses, 1994, Loompanics
. Hogshire is the crux of the 1997 Harper's article by Michael Pollan
https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/opium-made-easy/ where the author doesn't seem to grok why that knowledge makes the difference between a (potential) felony possession or manufacturing charge versus nothing to worry about. Pollan goes on and on about being befuddled by thinking of it as a thoughtcrime.
My understanding is that what's termed "poppy straw" in the US Controlled Substances Act of 1970 had not previously been illegal to possess; prior law did not ban possession of that particular plant just by itself. "Papaver somniferum l." is there defined as being a Schedule II (C-2) where the CSA defines the illegal drug as being all parts of the plant except the seeds and roots. The reason that Michael Pollan was worried first about lancing the poppy pods he had planted and then worried way more about the emails he'd sent Jim Hogshire--he worried an awful lot about many things, including worrying about police searching his trash because they could do so without a search warrant--was all of that stuff being potential evidence of his intent to use the growing poppies as a drug instead of for a purely ornamental purpose. The legislative purpose of the CSA is to deter and control the uses and abuses of psychoactive drugs, so if the person has no signs of using the stuff because it's a drug, well then at least in the US it's not a crime.
This is so also because in the US in order to be convicted of illegally possessing ANYTHING whether it's a drug or child porn or a weapon, the law seems to always have the words "knowingly and willingly" right in the very statute, and while a judge can reinterpret those words ultimately in a jury trial it'll be the jurors who can make that decision on whether there was knowledge and intent by the accused, and beyond reasonable doubt no less. But, if you're not in the US, don't count on your laws being the same.
That C-2 status of papaver somniferum means it's legal to possess with a doctor's valid prescription, and the doctor would need to have the DEA license needed to prescribe cocaine HCl or hydromorphone, and it would be a matter for their state laws or state medical board if that was legitimate medical practice which if not then the Rx would be considered invalid. Just saying. It would make no difference whether it was being prescribed (or used without Rx) for diarrhea or for pain. But it couldn't be used for purposes of maintaining the comfort of the so-called opiate addict, which is only allowed with buprenorphine for outpatients or methadone dispensed from a maintenance clinic.
P.S. The somniferum variety is not the only variety of papaver that contains morphine and such. There have been a few legal cases where the defense contended that it was a different botanical variety of poppy and it would be quite complicated and expensive for the prosecution to prove otherwise, where again, unlike many other countries, the burden of proof is on the state.
