Isn't poppy straw completely legal in the UK tho Bleaney?
There used to be a guy selling pods with a union jack on his website who was clearly selling them for poppy tea he had his "favourite turkish gigs - direct from our goatherder and so good that I bought him a new pair of sandals for all his efforts"
Yeah it looks like you may be correct.
However, obviously it becomes illegal if you extract the alkaloids from that straw and process them into opium or heroin.
But what about all the scenarios in between?
What about if the straw is sold for it's high alkaloid content with seller knowing the buyers intend to extract those alkaloids? Either by making a tea, or some more advanced processing.
Why don't these online pod retailers stay in business for very long?
Those sellers advertising their pods as being great for making 'special brews' etc or anything even more explicit about high alklaoids for strong brews, are surely skating on very thin ice, legally?
How can dried poppy pods, without the stems, be sold for "arts and crafts"? That seems ridiculous to me, as it's pretty difficult to do dried flower arranging with no stems to work with?
Would that consitute a legal case?
What if the pods have next to no alkaloids? As in the ornamental varieties.
Making a tea out of home grown or purchased pods would also be incredibly difficult for LE to charge anyone for, I'd imagine. As you'd have to be caught in the act of making the brew and drinking it?
So many questions and ambiguities though. (I'm not expecting you to have all the answers, but many of these questions are puzzling me.)
Things seem much more straight forward in terms of growing. You can legally grow any strain but it's illegal to extract the raw opium. Simple. I think it may even be illegal to grow with the intent of doing that. But unless you had opium stained razor blades or something like that, intent could never be proved?
.Yes I think,that they still grow pharma poppy.Eastern Mediterranean is an ancient land of opii.From here he expands to the East-Persia,India,China...The tribes from the ancient Thrace culture grows it along with a lot of canabis.Archeologists still find ancient tools to score pods-it cames even before the Thracian culture-so called"protoThrace",which was a neolithic culture(around six millenium B.C. old.The oldest gold incrustation also came from here-Varna necropolice.You can check it-it's a historical fact)The pods we had ones time are no less strong,than H......so yeah this was an old fashioned remedy for all.....and never read something that tells about some big drug problem in the past...may be,cause this was only exporting good with hard price just like gold.Alcohol is our national drug.