"Poppies are among the easiest of all flowers to grow. Their brilliantly colored flowers look like crinkled sheer silk and are often delightfully fragrant," emoted "Annuals," a book from the Time-Life Encyclopedia of Gardening found in local libraries.
The prized "Taylor's Guide to Annuals" offers detailed directions for growing all the Papaver varieties, but notes under somniferum, "The juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the production of which is illegal in the U.S."
"Rodale's Annual Garden" contains the same simple warning, but goes on to rave, "The flower is, however, of great beauty and available in a number of different cultivars. Plants will often grow 4 feet tall and bear blossoms up to 5 inches wide. A large bed of these flowers is a breathtaking sight."
Unfortunately, a large bed of these flowers is a felony, even for the gardener who never intends to extract the opium and who bought the seeds from a company that didn’t even identify the Papaver somniferum as the opium poppy.
"It sounds to me like they’re sending out kits to commit a felony, yet nobody goes after them," Hogshire said. "You rely on a company that sells seeds not to trick you into committing a crime, and certainly not one where you could end up in a cage for a few years. But they do. And I think the reason is clear. It’s a political thing who gets charged with a crime."
Eighty-year-old grandmothers simply aren't going to face police drug raids because they have poppy gardens. And even if that did happen, ignorance of their flowers' narcotic alter-egos would probably result in no charge being filed.
"The law does require ‘knowing possession,’" said Schloss.
What of the gardener reading this article, or otherwise learning the opium poppy's secrets? With that knowledge, the gardener goes from growing flowers to committing felonies without any change in her actions.
Mary (not her real name) from Los Osos made that change in May.
It was three seasons ago that Mary's friend gave her some poppy seeds, with a wink and a nudge she wouldn't understand until this year. She scattered her garden with them in early spring, unaware of the potential within the seeds she sowed.
They grew large and bushy, almost weedlike, rising into stems topped with large, drooping buds that would unfold into brilliant red flowers with slightly ruffled petals and a black heart cradling a yellow puff.
"They are just so huge and beautiful, such gorgeous flowers," Mary said.
She paid little attention to the green seedpod that formed after the flower fell away, almost perfectly round, but topped by a lighter green crown. The plants themselves would wither away with the coming of winter, but in the spring, the poppies would almost magically regenerate themselves.
Another poppy season came and went as gloriously as the one before. And again they returned, in the spring of this year, although Mary's poppy patch wouldn't make it through a third season.
Poppies became big news locally in May, both with the raid of the McLean's home and the discovery of several acres of opium poppies growing wild in Montaña de Oro, which were removed by Narcotics Task Force agents.
Mary became suspicious of her flowers and brought pictures to her gardening club, asking if they could be opium poppies. One woman told her, "Oh, no, they're just Oriental poppies." But another woman, seeing the picture, identified them as opium poppies with no prompt. More research confirmed Mary's new status.
She felt a mix of excitement and dread. Curious and open-minded, Mary tried to extract some opium, but got very little, too little to even use. Slowly, such thoughts were overcome by fear.
"It's the first time I owned a house, and I didn't want to lose my house. I just started to panic, so I pulled them out," Mary said, pausing a moment, "Oh, I kept a couple, I must admit."
Question of Intent
Given how easy it is to grow opium poppies, and how widely they are grown with no intent other than to enjoy the beauty and fragrance of the flower, those who enforce our laws are presented with difficult choices, over which they have wide discretion.
"It really is a question of the content of the circumstances surrounding the proof of knowledge about the character and substance of the narcotic," Shea said.
To establish that knowledge, police can seize whatever materials they believe indicate knowledge. For example, finding a copy of this very article in a home with poppies in the garden would likely be enough to establish knowledge.
Faced with detailed questions about Papaver somniferum, how it is tested, whether opium samples can be definitively identified as being from this plant, and the legality of closely related cultivars–questions that would seem essential to a successful prosecution–Schloss, who is prosecuting the Dunbar/Harrison case, was perplexed.
"I couldn't even spell that word you're saying," Schloss said of Papaver somniferum. "I'm not a plant guy."
Schloss is more certain about answers to questions that many innocent gardeners wouldn’t even know to ask.
"Is it possible to possess opium while it's still in the poppy? Of course," Schloss said.
If such questions seem strange, and their answers troubling, that’s largely because our society is still struggling with how to deal with new fears of an old plant.
Poppies were cultivated for their opium as early as 3400 B.C. in lower Mesopotamia. They called it hul gil, or "joy plant." Later, it would take on the scientific name somniferum, which means "sleep inducing," after doctors found it to be perhaps the best natural pain reliever ever discovered.
References to the opium poppy are found throughout classical literature, from references in many Shakespeare works to Thomas DeQuincey’s autobiographic "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" to the scene when Dorothy and friends fell asleep in the poppy field on their way to see the Wizard of Oz.
Many of our country’s founding fathers used opium, including Benjamin Franklin, an opium addict most of his life, according to historians. In the 1800s, opium was the main ingredient in many of the most widely used elixirs and patent medicines.
But by 1890, William Randolph Hearst’s sensational tabloids began writing stories about white women being seduced by Chinese men and their opium, tying the drug to our growing nationalist fears of the East. In 1905, Congress made opium possession illegal.
Most opium at that time was imported from potent strains, but opium poppy varietals grew throughout the United States.
"There is no part of the United States where poppies, even opium poppies–maybe especially opium poppies–won’t grow. They can adapt to a lot of conditions. They are very common. It’s hard to stop them from growing," Hogshire said.
The flowers can be red, pink, white, purple, or bicolored, and the petals can be either flat or fringed, yet the plant's aesthetics have little impact on its narcotic potential.
Dunbar and Harrison have a list of several dozen addresses around the county where they have discovered opium poppies growing, most in people's front yards, some in flower gardens maintained by businesses, even a few on government property.
"Poppies are everywhere," Hogshire said.
As winter approaches, opium poppy plants have gone dormant. Most gardening books advise sowing poppy seeds in the late fall and letting them "winter over."
All this winter, the seeds will sit below the surface of the soil, waiting for the warmth of spring to sprout forth and grow. It is then that we will find out whether the prosecution of Dunbar and Harrison is an isolated incident, or whether they are the first of many San Luis Obispo County residents to face prison terms for the flowers they choose to grow.
Staff writer Steven T. Jones is currently planning his spring garden, which will include poppies, but not opium poppies. Send gardening tips to sjones@newtimes-slo.com.