Opium plant

            Opium is an annual plant, 50-150 centimeters tall. The pods from purple poppies are normally used by hill tribes as an offering to spirits, and as medicine. An opium plant yields 3-8 opium pods Opium, as used for drug or medicinal purposes, is the latex gained from scoring a mature, yellowish opium pod 3-7 days after the last petal has dropped off, an appropriate time to score opium pods is at noon till the afternoon, because It believed that a warmer temperature accelerates the yield of latex.

            Scoring poppy should be done carefully, if scored too deep the pods will yield little raw opium which is white liquid. The liquid will coagulate and turn into dark brown later. This is why the scored pods are left overnight before being collected.

            - Each opium pod can be scored for 3-4 times with 2-3 days in between each time.

            - To gain one viss (1.6) kilograms) of opium. 3,000 pods of opium are needed.

            - One rai (0.41 acre or 0.14 hectare) of land can yield 1 kilogram (2.2Ibs) of raw opium in average.

            - Raw opium can be kept for 2 years without losing its potency.

            Without any alkoloid, tiny, kidney0shaped opium seeds are entable e.g. used in decorating cake and making desserts. Opium seeds are also useful for other purpose: oil extrates from seeds is an ingredient for dry cleaning liquid detergent, paint, soap: waste from oil extraction can be used as feed, e.g. for pigeons.