Poppy Cock- Truth and Lies about Poppies, Opium, and Painkilling Drugs: (an Excerpt)

by Jim Hogshire

(Published in Disinformation's huge compendium, "You Are Being Lied To", edited by Russ Kick, 2001)
(photos collected from around the web)

California Poppy and Seed Pod

Thomas Jefferson was a drug criminal. But he managed to escape the terrible swift sword of justice by dying a century before the DEA was created to stamp out that sort of thing. In 1987 agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at Montecello, Jefferson's famous estate. They must have known the Founding Father was dead, but his crime was alive and well.

Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are currently illegal. Now, the trouble was the folks at the Montecello foundation, which preserves and maintains the historic site, were discovered flagrantly continuing Jefferson's crimes in the name of "history." The agents were blunt: The poppies had to be immediately uproot- ed and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests, and individuals from the foundation would soon be facing a ten-year stretch in prison.

The story sounds stupid now, perhaps, but the threat was real, and it scared the hell out of the people at Montecello, who immediately waded into the garden and started yanking out poppies. A DEA man scanning the wares in the giftshop noticed the store was selling packets of the poppy seeds, "Thomas Jefferson's Montecello Poppies." The seeds had to go, too. While poppy seeds might be legal, it is never legal to plant them. Not for any reason. So, selling packets of seeds intended for planting was promoting a felony. Better not have these around anymore.

Employees even gathered the store's souvenir T-shirts—with a pic- ture of Montecello poppies silk-screened on the chest—took them out...and burned them.

Nobody told them to do this, but, under the circumstances, it didn't seem so unusual.

Jefferson's poppies are gone without a trace now. Nobody said much at the time, nor are they saying much now. Visitors to Montecello don't learn how the Founding Father cultivated poppies for their opium. His use of opium an well never have existed.

The memory hole is alive and well in the USA.

Field of Wild Poppies

The American War on Drugs started with Opium and continues with opium to this day. The government has rewritten history more than once to fight the Demon Poppy.

Deception in key to this kind of social control- along with the usual mayhem and threats of mayhem. Such a comprehensive disinformation campaign like the one waged against poppies can be so effective that there is no need for violence. Ever since the passage of the Harrison Act made opium America’s first "illicit substance" 85 years ago, propaganda has proved itself most effective in the war on poppies. This has not been done so much by eradicating the poppy plant from the nation’s soil as by eradicating the poppy from the nation’s mind.

Prosecutions for crimes involving opium or opium poppies are rare. But that has less to do with the frequency of poppy crimes and everything to do with suppressing information about the opium poppy. A trial is liable to get out of hand and publicize information at A DEA man odds with what everybody "knows" about poppies and opium. That might pique interest in the taboo subject and, worse, undermine faith in the government.

Along with the usual tactics of propaganda (outright lies, disinformation, etc.), the United States government battles the poppy by creating and enforcing a sort of deliberate ignorance about opium, opium poppies, and everything connected with them. This strategy has done a remarkable job. The memory of opium poppies has been all but erased, and remaining bits of information still floating around are quickly suppressed by any of numerous techniques. The escapade at Montecello exemplifies one tactic. The poppies were removed swiftly and without fanfare; sotto voce threats ensured no one would talk about it afterwards. Nobody goes to jail, because ideally, nothing happened.

Today’s visitors to the famous estate do not learn anything about poppies that aren’t there. They won’t look at an opium poppy and hear its name. They surely won’t learn anything about the plant’s value or why Jefferson planted it....

Appendix; The Role of Pain in Freedom The poppy's central aid indispensable position in our civilization makes access to it as important as you might expect, so the forbidding of the people's access to the poppy is staggeringly cruel. Ceding control of opiates means ceding control of pain relief to the State...which has shown a truly morbid interest in inflicting pain and denying its relief in order to effect social change. This is not a power a free people should give up without a fight.

Pain is the archetypal "scourge of mankind" and is what makes tyranny possible. Even without the participation of human evil, pain is the terrible price we pay when we violate the laws of nature.

All by itself, pain can kill you. And it is an affliction that has dragged mankind into misery without sign of letup.

Even the many diseases that science has "conquered" still cause serious pain. Our modern lives are no freer from pain than that of the sclerotic, twisted figure deformed by stoop labor or worse. "Modern" pain is every bit as excruciating as the rack. Ever spoken to someone with carpal tunnel syndrome (RSI)? Advanced cancer? And perhaps worst of all, burn victims? For these last people, even the most powerful opiates are not enough. They normally beg to die.

It is not particularly funny to consider that Dr. Kevorkian once saved a patient from a lifetime of hell simply by agreeing to help her die. When her own doctor discovered how serious she was, she was given the pain medication that was available from the beginning. And yet we are encouraged to perceive the opium poppy and its derivatives as evil.

It is obvious that God has provided for mankind an astonishing abundance of medicines to cure or treat disease, including pain. The opium poppy does that better than the best-equipped, most dedicated scientist can do. Opium is so easy to cultivate, so miraculously useful in so many ways, it is mind-blowing to view it as evil. In fact, given the reality of the situation, opium is a blessing and a boon for the poor and oppressed.

The ability to vanquish pain is something of a prerequisite for civlization. People in pain are unproductive, tend to spread their misery by complaining, and it's a matter of biological fact that pain especially chronic pain, is itself a kind of disease. Whatever else is wrong with you, guaranteed the addition of pain will make it worse.

So the government's control of opiates—and its larger effort to deprive anyone of truly effective pain relief (unless they get the government's permission)—is a stunningly crude method of social control. Pain avoidance is a powerful motivator.

We all know about the rat pressing the bar so often to get jolt to the pleasure center of his brain, pressing "till he keels over from exhaustion. How about the rat that leaps back and forth over a short wall to avoid an electric shock from the screen-floor? A light signaling the impending shock quickly) teaches the rat to jump immediately. That's bad enough, but when the jerks running the experiment stop linking the warning light with the jolt and just randomly shock the poor rodent, he begins to deteriorate faster than the sickest skid row bum. He becomes ultra-nervous, develops neurotic behaviors, and is obviously in constant anxiety in anticipation of the pain he cannot avoid.

In psychological parlance, the rat is the victim of "learned helplessness" and begins to display all of the traits commonly associated with "depression." His life on earth becomes unpleasant and short. In other words, he gets mean and dies.

Yet a single dose of morphine can reverse this learned behavior. What took so much time and sadistic dedication to destroy is healed within minutes. What does this tell us, then?

The power to relieve pain is even greater than the power to inflict it.

Social control and economic control—in a broad sense—are obvious motivations behind the government's "opiate policy." Tightly restricting the creation and dispensation of pain medication concentrates a lot of money into a few hands, and these individuals scratch each others' backs. Besides the money being more-or-less fully controlled, this system makes it possible to increase profits to almost any extent (due to the inelastic demand for opiates).

It also allows a system of surveillance over the segment of the population that seeks painkillers. That is to say, the majority of people, or better still, all people.

The ramifications of controlling pain are huge. At bottom, every organism responds most predictably and most constantly to pain. No police state could exist without the ability to dole out pain. And pain comes in so many forms! The pain of torture from the sting of a whip is only academically different than the more psychic pain of incarceration.

If anyone doubts the power of pain as a tool to control people's behavior, they need only look to the experiments done by Nazis, later duplicated by academics at Yale and other such universities.

Enough pain will make you shock your own mother, will make you shock a stranger to death with electricity. At that point, it isn't really the pain so much as the threat of pain that evokes such obedient responses. At that point, it is relief from pain that is used by the controller to assure complain.

Even greater than the power to inflict pain is the power to relieve it. Every tyrant knows that a person in pain will also reliably respond to the "positive" reinforcement of relief from pain. The ability to offer that—an escape from agony—is a power no amount of money can buy.

Texas Poppies