State flower actually has nothing to do with it. The regulation in question simply says that you can’t pick any flowers from land that you don’t own without the owner’s permission:
Pretty much every Californian has heard that it is illegal to pick Poppies in the state. This is largely due to the fact that the California Poppy is the state flower, and is perceived to be off limits to all. However, that is not entirely the case.
California Penal Code (PC) 384a is most likely the cause of this urban legend, even though it does not expressly mention poppies. PC 384a states, in the simplest of terms, that it is illegal for an individual to pick, harm, or destroy any plant life that is on property that they do not own, or do not have permission to do so. This law basically makes it illegal to vandalize someone else’s plants.
Under this law, it can be illegal to pick poppies, if they are on land not owned by the picker. However, if the picker owns the land, or has permission to pick the poppies from the land’s owner, then they can pick the flowers.
Ah, okay. California is an agricultural state. Makes sense to pass laws prohibiting messing around with any plants not on your property - your neighbor’s avocado or cashew trees are valuable as hell.
In GQ responses, there’s a reason we put in links. Had you clicked on the one at the beginning of my post instead of just skipping that sentence in your quote, you would have seen that the law we’re discussing has nothing whatsoever to do with poppies being the state flower.
And of course it isn’t about restricting drug use. If it was, they wouldn’t let you grow them on your own property, either.
Opium and its derivatives come from just one species, Papaver somniferum. But even having seeds from that species doesn’t necessarily mean you can produce opium, since the ability to produce opium alkaloids has been practically bred out of many strains intended for ornamental use. I imagine this isn’t too different from how industrial hemp contains little or no THC.
I’d be interested to know if the non-opium opium poppies can produce those tasty seeds that we love.
Maybe I was wrong about the potential for illicit drug production from an ornamental garden.
There’s a 2017 paper containing measurements of morphine content obtainable from ornamental varieties of P. somniferous. While none of the cultivars tested were as potent as “industrial” poppies, some supposedly demonstrated potential for abuse.
''The cultivars richest in morphine content were ‘Queen’s Poppy’ (676 mg/100g) and ‘Lauren’s Grape’ (627 mg/100g), other varieties contained morphine less than 600 mg/100g (Table 1)…There is no clear definition of morphine-rich P. somniferum cultivars, but a cultivar is considered industrial if its ripe capsule walls contain at least 800 mg/100g of morphine (Matyasova et al., 2011).
Literature data (Shuljgin, 1969; Duke, 1983) and our experience show that the average yield of capsules may be 37–145 g from 7–15 plants per square metre. If the average content of morphine in capsules is 362 mg/100g, the theoretical yield of morphine is 134– 525 mg per square metre. In case of a home garden opium poppy bed of 10 m × 10 m, the yield of morphine from one bed of ornamental P. somniferum cultivars could be about 13–50 g.‘’
Injection of ‘‘poppy liquid’’ is described as a common form of drug abuse in places like Estonia and Ukraine.
It still strikes me as a lot of trouble to extract morphine/opium from a large patch of backyard poppies without attracting undue attention.*
*“Hey, I’m just reenacting a scene from “The Wizard of Oz”.”
The seeds of other poppy types are not eaten, but they are cultivated for the flowers they produce. Annual and biennial poppies are considered a good choice to cultivate from seed as they are not difficult to propagate by this method, and can be put directly in the ground during January.[5] The California poppy ( Eschscholzia californica ), for example, is a striking orange wildflower that grows in the Western and Northwestern United States.
Of course, it doesn’t say why we generally don’t eat the seeds from the others. If I had to guess, it would be that the opium poppy is better for large scale cultivation, as well as having a very long history of cultivation. There are over 700 species of poppies, but it does strike me that the two other than the opium poppy that come to mind have rather small seed capsules compared to the opium poppy (California poppy and the red “flanders field” corn poppy from Europe).
You should read John Sandford’s Secret Prey. An older ladies garden club all turn out to be going through withdrawal every Tuesday. Turns out they make tea from the petals and leaves of their plants during their weekend gardening get togethers and one of their ingredients are petals from their poppys. I understand they found the tea very refreshing.