As the title suggests, opium is so ridiculously easy to make. I discovered this on a late-night rabbit hole deep dive and quickly realized that I could have a promising career in drug dealing, given that I’m a bit of a plant aficionado and that’s literally all it takes. 

Note that for all intents and purposes, I do not condone making or distributing any sort of drug, nor does The Round Table as an institution. 

That being said, it’s almost too fucking easy. The first thing you need is the papaver somniferum poppy seeds, which you can get for as little as three measly dollars at Walmart. These plants are fully legal to purchase and cultivate.

Then? You plant them.

It’s not very different from a typical herb garden. Ruffle the dirt, sprinkle the seeds, don’t suffocate them with dirt, and keep them wet without drowning them. Keep them alive for six months.

After six months and some change, you’ll get these green bulbous things sprouting up. When they look bigger than a grape but smaller than a golf ball, they’re ready to harvest. Slice them off at the stem. Make shallow slices in the bulbs and hang them upside down in a closed container. A latex substance will drop out from the bulbs. Allow it to drip down until the bulbs are empty, then allow the latex to harden.

Congratulations! You have made opium. That latex-y stuff is opium.

It is ridiculously easy to produce the common ancestor of an entire class of drugs. If you perform an acid-base extraction on this substance, you’ll get morphine; acetylate and crystallize morphine, and you’ll get heroin. This sounds intimidating until you realize that just about anyone in the Beloit College chemistry department can do this.

I don’t want to encourage anyone to make or consume opiates recreationally. Obviously these are highly addictive substances, and the scope of them goes beyond “having a good time.” Em Norman is a popular opiate addiction spokeswoman on shortform social media, and in her stories of heroin addiction, she reiterates the fact that after two months of regular opiate use, one no longer feels “high,” one only continues opiate usage in order to stave off withdrawal symptoms (which can, in fact, kill you! It’s called delirium tremens). But with a business model so easy, a startup price so cheap, a target demographic so easy to exploit and abuse, and a profit all but guaranteed, it’s no wonder why people start and continue operation in the opiate industry. There’s no real conclusion or moral to the story — opium and its derivatives are ridiculously easy to make, and insanely addictive due to their mechanism exploiting the brain’s most basic neurotransmitter reward system. 

On a college campus where young adults with underdeveloped brains are constantly trying new things, we are newly independent and an easily exploitable demographic, and we are walking ROI for folks with poppy plants. For this reason, it’s so vitally important that we do our best to carry Naloxone on us. The Beloit Public Library has a free Narcan vending machine, as well as free test strips. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services also has a list of locations across Wisconsin that distribute free naloxone. Naloxone is safe to give out for everyone in any circumstance, including but not limited to pregnant people, pets, and people on medications. When in doubt, always administer Naloxone. Remember to call 911 in events of suspected overdose, but do not mention overdose or drug usage to a 911 operator — mention the drugs to paramedics who arrive on the scene; this is to keep the person safe and to prevent a life-threatening medical emergency from being treated as a criminal matter. Stay safe and be responsible.