I've heard of the enhanced Morphine content poppies, but Thebaine is the preferred precursor for most all of the semi synthetics. Ion exchange resins have made it so efficient that literally everything but the roots can be used.
This is an excerpt from a trial of Johnson & Johnson, Teva and Purdue from May 30 2019:
Does the Norman cultivar consistently make elevated amounts of oripavine or is that another cultivar, engineering project, or just hit & miss?
I think it was in 2017 that I saw a story from the
Sydney Morning Herald about the national poppy crop and it sounds like in Tasmania it is 40-43 per cent high-thebaine, 40-43 per cent high-morphine, and presumably the rest are either the original 8-17 per cent morphine ones or something else. They have had people steal high-thebaine poppies, try to make opium and heroin out of them and get very sick.
I also believe that the famous poppy-eating macropods of Tasmania have figured out which fields have their medicine in them. I am sure other Australian animals eat them too, as do raccoons, rabbits, all sorts of rodents, birds of all descriptions, North and South American opossums, and I believe that the snake on the Rod of Asclepius comes from a European Rat Snake bringing a poppy in its mouth to another snake injured by another animal sometime back in antiquity. I know that monkeys get into South Asian poppy crops as well, as would be expected. In these cases it was manifest that they sought them out for intoxication, analgesia, anti-diarrhoeal properties or who knows what else, not unlike animals from bees to chimpanzees seeking out fermented fruit to get ploughed.
My favourite animal story was of the octopus in a pharmacology lab at a university in Canada I think it was who figured out what was going on, got out of her tank, walked across the room, got into the morphine and ate it all, then got back into her tank.
They also found out that rats laugh their arses off right before getting laid or getting shot up with morphine. I do as well, sometimes.
Thebaine can be the number three or at least four alkaloid in opium and is more concentrated in poppy straw than latex opium caeteris paribus, I believe. Not by much, but I think I heard it was the plant starting to make codeine into thebaine after a certain stage in the life of the poppy.