The gooey stuff is only gooey as it contains water. Dry it out and it becomes a hard chunk or if filtered after dissolved in water to remove the waxs you will end up with a crystallized sap color and opacity textured materials.
Essentially the gooey stuff dries with the pod and becomes impossible to bleed out and required powdering the pod to expose the dried opium, washing it with water dissolving your opiates, filtering to remove all the pod junk, and finally drank to get them opiates in your belly.
Bleeding the pods for opium leads to more than if the pods just grow and dry as the pods only produce so much opium before it is full where if it is bled it is able to release the opium and create space to produce more before the end of its life cycle.
One thing that's important do you know your pods are P. Somniforum? There are many types of poppy where only the above contains actives while others may be pure thebaine causing seizures or some negative side effect. Also it is quite easy to find poppy seeds just Google "unwashed poppy seeds" and you'll find many websites that are either reliable or sketchy as well as Amazon listings you can check reviews that other people put up.
Be careful, be safe, and remember opium/PPT/PST will lead to dependancy just like any other opiate and can even be just as excruciating if not worse than heroin. All it takes is becoming dependant and staying dependant and the longer you do the worse it is while supposedly poppy seed/pod tea withdrawals are drawn out and excruciating due to the combination of alkaloids possibly long acting ones. Just cause it is natural doesn't mean you can't get addicted.
Edit: The only way to know what pod you have is to pick and dry them yourself after identifying them while they are alive and flowing where dried it loses all of the qualities needed to identify one poppy from another or else you need to trust your vendor.
Edit 2: Also if you are collecting pods and drying them I suggest looking up how to score/Lance pods properly to bleed the opium to collect as you'll end up with more active to work with while the opium can just be mixed and drank while also you'll be able to mix all the opium together especially if you dissolve it in water, filter through a 93 micron bubble bag (used to make water hash), and allowed to dry without heat or else very low heat as the alkaloids can easily be destroyed by heat as the process will turn your raw opium filled with waxs into cooked opium that is mainly the opiates if done properly such as cooling the water solution of the raw opium before filtering will help to remove alot more waxs as well as using lukewarm water to mix the opium as the drop in temperature will cause the waxs and other inactive junk to precipitate out to stay suspended, but not dissolved in the solution unlike the opiates that stay dissolved and pass through the filter while the precipitated inactive stuff does not and can be tossed or made into its own cup of tea in case some actives are trapped in the gunk.
That way be it raw or cooked opium you just mix however much you need in water and drink as is no filtering, which can be weighed on a scale vs guessing how strong a pod will be and hoping you extract all the actives from the whole ground dried pod mess.
Also you can smoke the opium where I've heard both ways that the raw is better to smoke especially straight as the waxs prevent it from burning while the cooked is supposed to be easier to vaporize properly with less junk although IMO goes great on weed and while could be mixed with hash (using mostly solid dry higher micron rated hash block to lay a layer of opium on while covering the cooked opium with mostly dried, but still soft lower rates micron hash and then aloud to dry solid leaving a sandwich of opium in between hash while it should also mix pretty solid as the water should dissolve all the opium throughout the hash as it will soften the dried bottom layer and the opium should melt throughout evenly if done right), but supposedly hash only smokes at temperatures that destroy the hash although then why would anyone do it?
