It was late fall when I finally harvested my poppies. By now they had dried on their stalks, forming crinkled brown seedpods the size of walnuts.
According to James Duke, the retired USDA researcher I had spoken to, I had passed up a pharmacological opportunity by failing to harvest the seedpods while still fresh and full of sap, or opium. Duke suggested that alcohol would make a better solvent than hot water for extracting alkaloids from poppies, which made sense: laudanum is a name for just such a tincture of opium. "You can get the equivalent of a shot of heroin from a good green pod dissolved in a glass of vodka," Duke told me. I wondered why Hogshire's recipes focused on
poppy tea to the exclusion of alcohol-based preparations and then recalled something he'd told me: Hogshire was a Muslim, and so didn't drink alcohol.
Examining the pods in my garden, I could see that the tiny portals circling the anther at the top of each capsule had opened, releasing the poppy seeds to the wind. The seed portals looked exactly like the little observation windows circling the crown of the Statue of Liberty.
By now the seeds had probably been dispersed all over my garden, and would come up on their own, willy-nilly, next spring. If I didn't want opium poppies next season, I would have to sedulously weed every one of these volunteers.
I snapped a half dozen of the pods off their stalks and brought them into the kitchen. Though many of their seeds had been dis-persed, many more remained, and the pods made a rattling sound whenever they moved. Following Hogshire's recipe, I shook out the rest of the seeds (there were hundreds in each pod, ranging in color from beige to lavender to black) and crushed the pods in my fist. The shards I stuffed into the bowl of a coffee grinder, which in a few seconds noisily reduced them to a fine dun powder. I boiled a kettle of water and poured it over the dry tea in a mug, stirred the chestnut-colored mixture, and let it steep. The aroma was not at all unpleasant; it smelled of hay, not unlike a lapsang souchong tea. The whole procedure was so straightforward, so domestic in its particulars, that it felt no more controversial than making pesto or lemon balm tea, two
equally simple harvest operations I'd performed that week. I certainly didn't feel the lack of a Ph.D.
After fifteen minutes I poured the tea through a strainer, in the well of which it deposited a viscous brown slurry. With the back of a tablespoon I mashed this material against the mesh of the strainer,
pushing
through the last few ounces of liquid. The tea was ready
to drink.
Poppy tea tastes truly awful. It was nearly as bitter as raw opium and, after the novelty of the flavor wore off, slightly nauseating. I had asked James Duke why he thought poppies produced opium in the first place-what, in other words, was the evolutionary point? Alkaloids taste bad, he pointed out; it's conceivable that plants produce them as a defense against pests. "No animal's going to bother a plant that tastes that bad. So the plant with the worst taste is going to produce the most offspring."
It was a job getting a cup of the stuff down. The tea not only tasted terrible, but it was oddly filling too, and very soon made me queasy, a sensation much like a mild seasickness. I wondered if it was even possible to overdose on poppy tea; it seemed to me your stomach would rebel long before a significant amount could be ingested.
Within ten minutes or so, I began to feel... different. Not dramatically different, not "high," but not exactly the same self I was ten minutes before, either. Remembering what Jim Hogshire had told me about the tea's analgesic properties, I conducted an inventory of my everyday aches and pains and physical annoyances—a stiffness in the neck I'd woken with, the nasal and throat irritations of a particularly bad hay fever season, the usual dull pain in my knuckles after too many hours at the computer keyboard-and found that all these symptoms had, if not quite disappeared, then dropped beneath the threshold of my attention. They simply didn't matter. Then I decided it would be a good idea to inventory my mood, and concluded that it was very good indeed. Nothing I would describe as euphoric, but I was suffused body and mind with a distinct feeling of well-being—the words "warm" and
"aqueous" appear in my notes. I'm not sure whether it was the mode
of self-study l had logged onto, but the mental stance of standing just slightly apart from my self, coolly appraising my sensations and moods, suddenly seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I felt as though I was almost, but not quite, having an experience in the third
person.
Hogshire had said that the tea "can make sadness go away," and now I understood why he had employed that particular phrasing. For the poppy tea didn't seem to add anything new to consciousness, in the way that smoking marijuana can produce novel and unexpected sensations and emotions; by comparison, the tea seemed to subtract things: anxiety, melancholy, worry, grief. Like the opiate it is, or consists of, poppy tea is a pain killer in every sense. In my notes I wrote
"definitely lightens the existential load."
Fully expecting to be rendered useless by the tea—| have always been highly susceptible to drugs, and opiates are commonly thought to be soporific— had chosen an afternoon for my experiment on which there was little I needed to get done. And for the first hour, as I sat there at my desk assessing its effects, I did feel a powerful urge to close my eyes—not from any drowsiness, but from a radical and by no means unpleasant sense of passivity. I just didn't need to have all that visual information, thank you very much. My senses were functioning normally, yet I didn't particularly feel like acting on their data.
At one point I remember feeling chilled, but couldn't be bothered to close a window or put on a sweater. I'll just sit here awhile longer if that's okay. "Like sitting out on the front porch of one's conscious-ness, watching the world go by," I wrote, somewhat cryptically.
But I found I could think clearly-as long as I thought about one thing at a time. De Quincey had said he found reading a congenial activity while eating opium, and for a while I read a book with perfect
concentration. But during the second hour I noticed I was actually feeling energetic, even purposeful. Now I felt like stepping down from porch-consciousness and heading out into the garden to take
care of a few chores.
This was to be, I had decided beforehand, a one-time experiment, and I knew I had to rid my garden of poppies, the sooner the better. So I set to work pulling up the withered stalks. But I was unsure exactly what to do with this crop of dead flowers—-this evidence. I had read that the police no longer needed a search warrant to search my garbage (another juridical fruit of the drug war), so throwing them out with the trash was out of the question. I finally decided simply to compost them; by spring they'd be indistinguishable from the decomposing sunflower heads, broccoli plants, eggshells, and table scraps mounded up on the pile of compost in the corner of my vegetable garden.
No comments:
Post a Comment