To be fair opium poppies are just a plant
Shhhh, you'll upset the dim.
There was a story a while back about a council getting it in the neck for planting poppies (I say planting, if you knew the life cycle of poppies, you'd know why they can suddenly appear in recently ploughed fields).
www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jul/10/markoliver
I did like this last paragraph ...
The Home Office revealed last year that opium poppies are grown at 29 secret locations in Britain, mainly in Hampshire, to supply painkillers.
I can reveal that opium poppies are grown at tens of thousands of public locations all over Britain, so fuck the Home Office sideways.
It is, of course, another illustration of the crock o'shite that is the justification for our drugs laws, that despite there being as much opium as the UK could possible use (you'd run out of tea first) we don't have a massive opium problem.
I also liked the sly:
However, turning it into morphine is much harder, and producing heroin from the morphine is more difficult still outside a proper laboratory, and the process can be potentially explosive at the purification stage.
Which suggests that the Home Office should stick to drafting and enforcing shit laws, and leave the science and chemistry to the experts.
I love poppy seed bread and Turkish cuisine.