Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now—pregnant with her fifth child—she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.
Then she ate a salad from Costco.
Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.
If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.
It’s actually fairly easy to fail a drug test from poppy seeds. It’s literally where we get opium from. You do not need digestive issues, or even a ton of poppyseeds.
It takes like half a teaspoon.
Also not all poppyseeds are created equal. Some contain far more/less alkaloids than others.
“Easy” is a stretch.
Yes, poppy seeds are the seeds of the poppy plant which is a large component of opium. But they are not actually opium and your body tends to digest the seeds (which are likely already broken down by the cooking process and however long they were in a jar) different than if you were to process and smoke or inject them. Which tends to lead toward trace amounts that should be below most thresholds… unless you are particularly dehydrated or otherwise didn’t digest the seeds properly.
A big part of the issue is that reputable research on how much you can get away with for a piss test tends to not be funded for whatever reason. It is the same reason that it is generally fine to use hemp based products (e.g. Dr Bronner’s) but nobody will ever put that in writing because there are too many unknowns and it just leads to a mess.
Or, going back to smelling something dank at a concert or on a trail? Guidance was always to be terrified and run away to at least five states over. But the reality is that you basically would need to be hot boxed to get enough contact THC from that. But the threshold between “someone in this outdoor venue is smoking a marijuana cigarette” and “I am stuck in a cloud of weed smoke” is very dependent on far too many factors. So it is easier to say “You get paid enough to just avoid it”
And of the less reputable studies (such as the “I am gonna eat poppy seeds and then piss hot”), they tend to have VERY wildly varying seeds. So stuff like fresh seeds off the plant and so forth.
Which is why I still find it wild that they would go from single piss test to action without a blood test. But not THAT wild since blood tests take significantly more time and money.
You don’t make opium from the seeds
You can wash them though and the “syrup” around contains morphine, codeine and stuff.
The seeds themselves don’t get processed, but the poppy cup gets cut so this white liquid flows on the outside.
That you scrape of and gets processed to opium or heroin.
Its just sap residue but yeah, you’re spot on. Some of the alkaloids linger altho most poppy seeds are washed unless its explicitly skipped
Thanks! Couldn’t come up with the correct word and settled for “syrup” ;-)
Not really. I’ve posted a bunch of science that proves that.
Do you have any science that disproves it?
No, it’s not easy to pop hot just from eating a dish with poppy seeds and it hasn’t been for a long time. The trace amounts aren’t nearly enough to reach the minimum threshold.
I would be 100% willing to believe hospital used substandard or defective tests, that she was on another legally prescribed medication that causes false positives, or even that the hospital administered opiates themselves, and through negligence and incompetece, forgot to put it in her chart.
But whenever someone says they ate a poppy seed muffin or salad, and that’s the only explanation they have, I’m immediately leaning towards actual opiates being the culprit.
Not saying it’s impossible these days, I’m saying it’s the least likely possible answer between those two options.
That said, this is the American healthcare system, so my money is on hospital error of some kind.
Scientific proof please.
This isn’t some new development. Anyone who’s had regular drug testing in the last 20 years is aware of this. Clearly, you haven’t had a regular drug testing requirement for a job, parole, or any other reason.
If you had, you would know that modern tests moved the threshold of detection up because of the exact issue with early era drug tests, which is why this idea persists.
I won’t call it a myth, because it’s always possible a batch of food grade poppy seeds wasn’t properly processed, and that batch has unusually high alkaline contents, or that someone consumed a disgustingly large amount of poppy seed muffins, or salad dressing, a day before their test, but that would be the exception, not the rule.
Also, have you never had the poppy seed salad from costco? The dress is in a small plastic ramekin with at most tablespoon of poppy seeds, but probably less.
So … link the info on the tests?
You are continuing to appeal to your own authority in this.