By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

If you’re a patient who is prescribed opioid pain medication, you may have been warned not to eat poppy seed muffins or bagels before a drug test.

The tiny black seeds may contain trace amounts of morphine and codeine, which can be detected in a drug screen and wreak havoc with your medical care. A positive test could result in your doctor taking you off opioid medication or even dropping you as a patient.

Is the poppy seed warning accurate or just an urban myth? A group of researchers wanted to find out, so they ran a series of tests to measure opiate levels in commercially available poppy seeds. They washed, steamed and heated the seeds to see how that changed concentrations of three opium alkaloids: morphine, codeine and thebaine.

Washing or soaking the poppy seeds in water significantly reduced the presence of all three opium alkaloids. So did heating the seeds at a temperature of 392 F for at least 40 minutes.

However, baking the seeds in a muffin for 16 minutes at 392 F didn't significantly change the opium alkaloids, possibly because the internal and external temperatures of the muffins reached only 211 F and 277 F, respectively.

“Baking had no significant effect on concentrations of opium alkaloids. Overall, these results indicate that opium alkaloids may not be significantly affected by baking or steam application and that poppy seeds may require water washing or extended thermal treatment to promote reduction of these compounds,” said lead author Benjamin Redan, PhD, a research chemist who works in the FDA’s Institute for Food Safety and Health.

Redan says poppy seed muffins would have to be baked for at least two hours just to reduce morphine and codeine levels by 50 percent – which is not a recipe for passing a drug test or for baking tasty muffins.

The findings were recently published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Poppy Seed Tea

Researchers and law enforcement agencies have been paying more attention to the lowly poppy seed because of anecdotal reports of people using the seeds to brew a potent tea that can be used for pain relief or to get high.

Late last year, Drug Enforcement Administration classified unwashed poppy seeds as a Schedule II controlled substance. While the poppy plant has long been classified as an illegal substance, the unwashed seeds were exempt because they were not perceived as a problem until recently.

“Individuals wishing to extract the opium alkaloid content from unwashed poppy seeds, use the seeds to create a tea, which contains sufficient amounts of alkaloids to produce psychoactive effects,” the DEA said. “Unwashed poppy seeds are a danger to the user and their abuse may result in unpredictable outcomes including death.”

The Internet is filled with stories about people experimenting with poppy seed tea. One alternative health website even has a recipe for making poppy seed tea that comes with a stark warning.

“Unfortunately, the abuse of or having insufficient knowledge about this tea has led to a few fatal incidences,” the recipe warns.