Poppy seeds are known to cause false positives on drug tests; in one case, a new mother’s baby was taken away after she failed a drug test due to eating a poppy seed salad.
Poppy seeds come from the Papaver somniferum plant, which is also used to make drugs like opium and morphine. In fact, many drug tests are so sensitive to opiates that the U.S. Department of Defense cautions service members to avoid foods with poppy seeds to prevent a drug test mix-up.
But is it actually possible to get high off of poppy seeds alone?
While your average poppy seeds likely have no intoxicating effects, it is technically possible to get high from poppy seeds — but it’s definitely not safe.
Related: How does a poppy seed bagel trigger a positive drug test?
Poppy seeds themselves contain little to no opiates. However, other parts of the poppy plant, such as the seed pods, contain opium, which can be further refined into substances such as morphine, codeine and heroin.
“People have safely consumed poppy seeds for hundreds of years because the seeds themselves don’t naturally contain opiates, but when they mix with other parts of the plant during harvest, opiate residue can end up on the seeds,” Eva Greenthal, a senior policy scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C., told Live Science in an email.
Most commercially available poppy seeds — like those you’d find in the spice aisle in a grocery store — are processed in a way that removes that opiate residue. However, unwashed or poorly processed poppy seeds could potentially contain enough opiates to intoxicate a person.
Still, it would be difficult (not to mention unpleasant) to eat enough straight poppy seeds to get high. On his website Science Questions with Surprising Answers, Christopher S. Baird, a physics professor at West Texas A&M University, estimates that you would have to eat up to 130 pounds (59 kilograms) of poppy seeds to have a noticeable effect. These numbers were based on a 2003 quantification of morphine and codeine concentration in commercially available poppy seeds.
However, brewing poppy seeds in hot water can produce a more concentrated effect. Poppy seed tea is sometimes even touted online as a natural, homemade pain remedy — but according to Greenthal, it’s anything but.
“This practice is extremely dangerous and can lead to overdose and death,” she cautioned.
Poppy seed tea is especially risky because the quantities of opiates in a bag of unwashed poppy seeds can vary wildly from batch to batch, making safe and consistent dosing nearly impossible.
In a study published in 2021, Greenthal and colleagues found that there had been at least 19 deaths and at least 20 nonfatal overdoses attributable to poppy seed tea.
Even if poppy seed tea doesn’t cause death or overdose, it can sometimes lead to dependence. In a 2019 report, Irving Haber, a pain management specialist at Terre Haute Regional Hospital in Indiana, described the case of a 42-year-old man who learned that poppy seeds were available for purchase online and began to make tea from them. Over time, he began needing more and more poppy seed tea every day, and he reached a point where he was no longer able to manage his business or personal affairs due to his addiction.
The patient ended up needing buprenorphine and naloxone, a medication combination used to treat opioid withdrawal. Other case reports include that of an 82-year-old woman who consumed up to half a gallon (2 liters) of poppy seed tea daily for years and that of a 26-year-old man who required methadone therapy to kick his $1,000-a-week poppy-seed-tea habit.
Since helping the patient in his clinic, Haber — alongside Steve Hacala, the parent of Stephen Hacala, a college student who died in 2016 after overdosing on poppy seed tea — has been petitioning the U.S. government to ban the sale of opiate-contaminated poppy seeds.
“We’re just trying to close a door, so to speak, on another abusable source of morphine,” Haber said.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.