Opioids Poppy Straw and Opium

[suessmayr]

I have two questions which despite multiple searches I've not really found answered. The first is: (1) when people talk about poppy straw being used for tea or whatever else, have the pods been lanced antecedently and drained? I understand that one of the incentives for opium-producing-countries, in beginning to use straw, was that they wouldn't have anymore to bother with the business of cutting all the pods, this being time-consuming, but could just 'mow' down an entire crop. But some tea recipes and things on wikipedia mention using already-scored-and-drained-pods as sort of after-products to make tea or derive alkaloids.

(2) If there are so many dozens of different varieties of poppies, all conforming to essentially the same physical structure and therefore having pods and presumably containing seeds in the pods, how is it that every single packet of poppy seeds in almost any supermarket is supposed to be of the somniferum variety? It doesn't make sense to me.

 

[sekio]

1. Poppy straw is usually the whole crushed plant; the pods are left intact or are not specifically scored.

2. There's not that many different varieties of poppy (somniferm, orientale, rhoeas) - lots are mislabeled somniferums, and P. Somniferum grows everywhere fairly easily and has been used for bagels for quite a while. Plus they're just pretty flowers.