I've tried nearly every method I've seen suggested for steeping poppy, and below is the process I developed myself in the search for the best way. In my experimentation, I found it outperformed not only other boils/steeps, but methods involving eating ultrafine ground pods and the espresso method as well.
You will need:
A small cooking pot
A stove or hot plate
A (big) bottle of lemon juice
A sleeve from an extra large plain white jersey T shirt(all cotton) or a piece of any light colored cotton jersey fabric about that size.
A tall drinking glass with a sturdy base - no stemware!
Ice
First, chop the stem off right after the knot, discarding the stem, and crack the pod so you can dump the seeds in a bowl. The stem has so little active alkaloid in it I haven't found it worthwhile to use considering it also makes the tea even worse tasting. I have heard that stashed stems can stave off withdrawals, but never tried them for that, so I can't speak to it.
Now chop, grind, blend, process, etc the pods - how you do it isn't important, nor, with my method, is getting a very fine particle size. Fine particles (dust really) is essential if you're drinking them, and a big, big help if you're steeping at lower temperatures and acidities. With this method it's faster if the bits are fairly fine, but you will get nearly perfect extraction even from chips of pod the size of my pink nail. I actually just crush my pods up by hand, wrapping them in cloth so the crowns don't give me papercuts. I treat the crowns and knots just like the rest of the pod, though I do tend to chop the knots into several pieces while splitting the pods in half to seed them, but if you're using a blender, food processor or grinder, it will take care of them just fine.
While making the tea, eat the seeds you dumped in the bowl, which are tasty.
Place the chopped pods in a small boiling pot, and pour enough lemon juice onto the pods to immerse them but without them floating. The lemon juice creates an acid environment, which does three things - it increases solubility of the active alkaloids, it helps breaks down the cell walls of the pods, and, by far most important, prevents oxidation of the solution. [see Notes(0)] You should get a slush after stirring the broken down pods together with the lemon juice. Add to this slush enough water to double the volume of the slush, maybe a bit more if the pieces are large and it's going to need a couple extra minutes of boiling.
Place the pot on high heat until it begins to boil, then turn it down to just barely simmering and let it go for 10 or 15 minutes. The larger the bits of pod, the longer you'll need to boil to fully saturate them; don't worry, I promise I'm not destroying your alkaloids.
During this time, you want to "press" the mixture while it simmers, using the bottom of a glass drinking cup, a tall one so you don't get steam burns. Use the bottom of the glass like a mortar, working acidic solution in and out of the plant material, moving it all over the pot. This is part of the reason particle size is much less important with this extraction - the pressing crushes the cell walls, making even biggish pieces permeable sponges.
You will find that by the time 15 minutes is up, give or take, the plant material is dark looking, rather than tan, and after turning off the heat, almost none of it will float. This means it's saturated with liquid, and the alkaloids are flowing as best they can from the pulverized mush.
Now add some ice cubes to the pot, enough to get it cooled down to the point where you can hold your finger in the liquid without discomfort, but not so many that any bits of ice linger.
Time for the first straining. Have that bowl ready, one big enough to hold your tea, but small enough that you can place the cotton T shirt cutoff so it covers the inside of the bowl and overlaps the top rim. Then pour the contents of the pot into the bowl. Bundle up the shirt around the pods, making sure you don't spill any pod bits into the liquid, which drains through the fabric, remaining in the bowl. Squeeze the bundle tighter and tighter, twisting it in a like you're wringing out a washcloth, and you will be amazed at how much liquid comes out of the plant material. This liquid is VERY saturated with opiates, so squeeze as much out as you possibly can.
Dump the plant material back into the pot, scraping as much as you can off the cotton tshirt filter. Repeat the whole bit with the lemon juice, water, and drinking-glass mashing, only this time, it will only need between five and ten minutes because the plant material is much more liquid permeable from the combined actions of the first boil, the pressing, and the violent crushing it experienced while you were draining it into the bowl.
Repeat ice-cooling.
Now, dump the first batch of tea (it will be DARK and very foul tasting) into a large cup or bottle, and reuse the bowl to repeat the draining procedure, making sure you have the same side of the shirt up as you did last time - you don't want to gag on a piece of plant material while chugging the tea later.
Repeat the bundling and draining, again squeezing as hard as you can (I twist the hell out of it in one direction, like I'm wringing out out a towel). This batch will be quite a bit lighter than the first, and not as potent, but still a bit nasty.
Here I do a triple final rinse. I slowly trickle hot water from the sink onto the bundle of plant material, letting it absorbs like a sponge until the pulp is saturated, then wring it out over the bowl again; really wring it with all you've got. I do this 3 times total, to be positive the plant material is totally stripped. The final one or two extractions will be very light, and taste more of T-shirt cotton than poppy. Not much flavor of any sort left. Discard the junk [You aren't throwing away anything useful, see Notes(3)], but save the tshirt filter, it will work many times before springing holes and requiring replacement.
Time to force down your tea. The high concentration of lemon juice actually improves the flavor quite a bit by taking the edge off the poppy taste, and I dissolve enough sugar in it to take the edge off the sourness, so it will slide down the gullet easy. It gets sticky and gross if you use too much though.
Adding finely chopped fresh ginger to the pods during boiling will improve flavor and reduce nausea, but I have a tough stomach so I don't usually bother. Honey instead of sugar as a sweetener seems to cut down on nausea a bit, too, but any sugar source helps.
If I am going to be carrying it in public in a water bottle, I mix all the liquid together and add a bunch of liquid chai concentrate. This gets it borderline pleasant tasting.
I have observed that this tea come on as fast or faster than any other extraction I've tried, 15 minutes to a half hour after ingestion on a relatively empty stomach and effects become quite noticeable.
Now, enjoy being blissed out for the next 6-10 hours.
This method works so well for two big reasons.
First, the large proportion of lemon juice protects the morphine from oxidation nearly perfectly. I have seen much smaller amounts than I use recommended. It's enough to increase solubility, but not enough to stave off the oxidation. Approximately 50% of the boil liquid needs to be lemon juice. See [Notes(1)].
Second, all the mechanical crushing. Breaking down the cell wall structure is why fine grinds work better, much more so than increased surface area, which is typically assumed to be the route of action. Aggressive crushing during the boil and straining will breach approaching 100% of the cell walls, while pushing acidic liquid in and out. This means it will work better than ultrafine grinding unless you are comparing it to grindings approaching cellular particle size, which isn't happening with home equipment.
It will also work at least as well (IME better) than eating find grinds, again because of the nature of the cell walls in the pod. The human body isn't capable of of metabolizing plant cell walls properly, no enzymes for it; rabbits, mice, deer, and anything that lives mostly on grass and leaves have no such trouble. This is why we see the corn in-corn out effect - much like poppy walls, the coating of a kernel of corn is impervious to our digestive chemical processes. With, very, very fine powder, your body will still get most of the alkaloids out by diffusion, but personally I don't like drinking the grinds at all, and find the slower come-up more annoying than taking the time to do the two boils and 3 rinses.
Tips:
Vinegar in similar quantities will substitute for lemon juice, but it makes perhaps the most disgusting tasting tea in the world, please don't try it. Using all orange juice or grapefruit juice(no water) for the liquid volume seems to work OK as a substitute if you truly can't get lemon juice for some strange reason. I'm not sure to what degree grapefruit juice heated for this length of time looses its potentiating effect, but if you've got it around anyway, drink down a fresh glass, it's quite refreshing between those mouthfuls of poppy seeds.
If you get very nauseous from tea, or want further potentiation and don't have to drive anywhere, take 100mg or so of diphenhydramine between bites of seeds while prepping the tea.
If you just can't stand the taste of the tea, it's worth noting that the oxidation protection offered by the lemon juice makes it possible to cook your tea down into tar without much loss. Just pour your tea into a teflon pan, and bake it at 200 degrees for a couple hours, until it's a dry, crispy resin.
The resin can be packed into gelcaps. After scraping it up, add JUST enough water to make it a dense tar (much less than you think - add with a glass dropper, even 1/4 teaspoon is far too much to start with) and once it's similar stiff clay, roll the tar into a rope just thin enough that it will fit into your capsule. Cut to the proper length, dip in powdered sugar(a safe nonstick coating so it will cooperate on the sliding part) and slip into the gelcaps. You will now have black opiate resin all over your hands as well, lick that stuff off, don't wash it down the drain.
The capsules work just as you'd expect, though they take longer to start kicking in than tea unless you pop them up your butt. If you go that way, you probably want to put a bit of warm water up there after you place the pills. Enema fans could also just stop the cook down when it gets to be thick liquid and squirt that in, as was pointed out by MadWolfZX when I originally posted this method.
Notes(0)
Boiling alone will not cause you to lose morphine, based on both my experience and science. Morphine itself doesn't actually boil off until nearly 400F, so temperatures water can reach will not degrade it. What causes the lost morphine some have observed when boiling poppy tea extractions is oxidation of morphine. However, rate of degradation of morphine by oxidation scales proportionally with alkalinity (this is indicated by higher PH values) in addition to high heat; just one or the other is not enough to reach significance in the time scales we are working with.
Notes(1)
If you want a demonstration that enough acidity will protect against oxidation before you risk a batch of pods on my word, try this little test: Cut an apple in half, and gently rub the cut side of one half with lemon juice. Then, leave both on the counter for an afternoon. The untreated half "rusts" nasty brown spots as you'd expect, but the lemon treated apple remains bright white as though freshly cut.
Notes(2)
To test that you are not leaving anything in the pod mush, chew and taste some of the plant material after the you squeeze out the 3rd warm tap water rinse. The pod wall bits will be soft, spongy, and have very little flavor at all, confirming the opiates, which have a strong flavor, are as depleted as reasonably possible and nothing can be gained by further steeping, rinsing, or eating this material.
Notes(3)
Grapefruit juice potentiating definitely works - it is lab-confirmed to increase the amount of codeine converted to morphine, as well as reduce morphine tolerance itself.