Chuck Baumhover, a retired insurance salesman from Des Moines, is a man of many interests.
He likes to kayak and hand people petitions and badger elected officials.
And he loves to bake. In fact, Baumhover's poppy seed bread is always a big hit around graduation time.
So the other day, he goes to the Dahl's on Fleur to buy a container or two of poppy seed but can't find any.
An assistant manager tells him they don't keep it on the shelf anymore. The kids steal it.
Baumhover says he never heard of such a thing. It's true, the assistant manager replies.
If you want a container of poppy seed, you have to go to the courtesy desk and ask for it. Almost as if you were buying liquor, cigarettes or prescription drugs.
Baumhover thinks this is strange — teenagers ripping off the grocery store spice rack — and suggests I check it out.
At first, it doesn't seem to make much sense. Can't the kids just pay for the stuff? Underage poppy seed possession isn't a crime. Buy a canister and you might get change back from your dollar.
But no, the store verifies Baumhover's story. An assistant manager says everyone was perplexed at first. Customers kept telling the employees the store was out of poppy seed, but the sales numbers didn't reflect the demand. So they put two and two together and took it off the shelf.
The Dahl's on Fleur, it turns out, isn't the only store taking precautions. This has been going on for a few years and not just in Des Moines. Some Hy-Vee stores in Cedar Rapids have been locking up the poppy seed for a while now.
The customers aren't just using it to fill kolaches. It seems kids around the country are using the poppy seed to brew tea and get high. (Poppy seed contains small amounts of morphine.)
In March, a University of Colorado student died from an accidental morphine overdose after drinking a tea made from poppy seed and pods.
It was a rare case, but it happened. While possession of poppy seed obviously isn't illegal, law enforcement officials in Colorado believe possession of poppy pods for making tea is indeed a crime.
While few kids seem to get high by eating the stuff straight from the container, some apparently believe they can use it as an excuse for flunking a drug test. As in, "Hey, that wasn't heroin. I had a poppy seed bagel for breakfast."
There have been cases where courts ruled in favor of defendants who claimed their positive drug tests were the result of innocent poppy seed consumption. But advances in testing have cut down on the number of false positives.
Diana McElroy, consumer affairs manager at Tone's Spices in Ankeny, says any reputable lab can tell the difference.
And many of the false positives were eliminated when businesses followed the government's lead and raised the testing threshold for morphine, opium and other narcotics.
But some kids are using the seed to brew tea. More experts than not seem to believe this is an addictive and potentially lethal practice.
Last year, ABC News quoted a pharmacology expert from the University of Florida who doubts the minute morphine content in poppy seed would pack a deadly punch and a Harvard Medical School professor who cites research that says just the opposite.
The opiate concentration in a bottle of seed is so small, it takes pounds to create the desired effect, but it can be done.
"This process is not to be taken lightly," the Harvard professor said, "because while the little poppy seed that is in the grocery is perfectly harmless when used in moderation, such as adorning a bagel or in a muffin, once you start to mess with Mother Nature and concentrate the seeds, you increase your exposure to all sorts of other chemicals. Pesticides, heavy metals as well as a host of other chemicals that are way below harmful levels when consumed as directed are now being consumed in dangerously high concentrations."
A big drawback, apparently, is the tea's taste. It's awful.
McElroy and some of the folks at Dahl's would rather I didn't write about this subject. They say it's old news and another story might give Internet-savvy kids dangerous ideas.
Possibly, but it wasn't old news to Baumhover. And as a parent, wouldn't you rather know?
?! Who'd a thunk it
