Papaveraceae
Papaver somniferum
Opium poppy · Breadseed poppy
- Part used
- latexseedfruit
- Native range
- Probably the western Mediterranean; not certainly known in the wild, and among the oldest cultivated plants
- Morphology
- An annual to a metre and a half with grey-green clasping leaves and large white to purple flowers, followed by a rounded capsule that exudes white latex when scored.
What is in it
Evidence
Its isolated alkaloids are foundational analgesics with unambiguous efficacy. Nothing here is a claim about the raw plant, which has no controlled place in modern practice.
Safety
Respiratory depression and death in overdose; strong dependence liability. Latex content varies enormously with variety, climate and growing conditions, so any unmeasured preparation has an unknown potency. Poppy seed is culinary and effectively free of alkaloid, though it can produce positive opiate drug screens.
Interactions: Profound additive respiratory depression with alcohol, benzodiazepines and other CNS depressants
Regulatory: Cultivation is licensed and controlled in Australia (chiefly Tasmania) and most countries. The alkaloids are scheduled controlled substances.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Cultivated in Neolithic Europe and recorded in Sumerian tablets. Central to Greek, Roman, Islamic and medieval European medicine as the principal analgesic and soporific available, and the basis of laudanum from Paracelsus onward. Friedrich Serturner isolated morphine from it around 1804 — the first alkaloid ever isolated from a plant, and the beginning of modern pharmacology.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Morphine was the first alkaloid anyone pulled out of a plant, and the technique that got it out is the technique that made every other entry in this collection possible.
Serturner was a young apothecary's assistant. What he demonstrated was that the activity of a plant could be concentrated in a single crystalline substance which could be weighed — that a medicine could have a dose. Every argument in this section about standardisation, about variability, about the difference between a leaf and a milligram, descends from that one result.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.