Opium and Laudanum

Opium was a perfume that was very popular in the 80's.  The scent was indeed intoxicating.  I loved everything about it, except the price, and the name.

But that's not what we're talking about today.  This post is about the real deal.  Highly illicit opium.  Most of you undoubtedly know that opium is derived from opium poppies, Papaver somniferum.  The legality of growing these poppies in the US is somewhat ambiguous, but the seeds are available for sale through many nurseries.

There will undoubtedly be injuries down the road at some point, and the patients would be relieved of some suffering with a little opium, or laudanum, which is a tincture of the opium poppy.  I was in the hospital on morphine for a week when I got gutted like a fish and had my spleen, gall bladder, and most of my pancreas removed.   

Four years after that surgery, I had a stupid attack and took off almost an inch of my right pinky.  The intense pain following surgery (just to cover the wound--my finger was gone) was only relieved by Percocet.  That pain was far more intense than recovering from major abdominal surgery, for which after the first few days of morphine in the hospital I was only given Vicodin.  I realized then how easy it would be to become addicted to Percocet and other similar pain relievers.

While major abdominal and thoracic surgeries will be a thing of the past in TEOTWAWKI Town, amputations will not.  Hopefully, they won't happen too often, but take my word on this, you want to be prepared to deal with the pain.  I've delivered six babies, including one breech with no pain relief at all, and one eight-pound-plus baby with no anesthesia and with pitocin (which made the pain more intense).  Those deliveries were the most pain I'd ever experienced, so we'll call them a level ten on the pain scale they use in hospitals.  That was until I had gallstones a few years later.  The gallstones became the new ten, and labor and delivery dropped to an eight on the pain scale.

Then I took my finger off.  My daughters got me ice and a washcloth, and I drove myself to the hospital where nerve blocks were injected and surgery was eventually performed.  My finger was heavily bandaged--layers and layers of gauze.  And yet, I could feel the gentle breeze of the fan through all that gauze, and it was extremely irritating.  Percocet made the next week bearable, but I feared becoming addicted, so I had my husband take it to our storage unit where I wouldn't find it (we were getting ready to move at the time).

Two weeks after surgery I had the stitches removed.  On the pain scale, labor and delivery dropped to a one.  Gallstones became a two.  Removing stitches from a finger that had been amputated was the new ten.  Having to experience that kind of pain again or knowing a family member could undergo something like that scares the bejeebers out of me.  I can't imagine having to endure pain like that without something for relief.

Opium and laudanum were the solution during the Civil War.  Obviously, they weren't a great solution due to the addictions that developed.  However, in critical situations, one might consider turning to them. 

These substances are highly illegal right now.  I'm not even comfortable writing much about them.  So you'll have to do further research on your own. 

The link below takes you to a DEA website where they share information on how opium is extracted from the poppy seed pods.  (Am I the only one who finds it more than a little odd that the DEA is telling the world how to make opium?)

https://museum.dea.gov/exhibits/online-exhibits/cannabis-coca-and-poppy-natures-addictive-plants/opium-poppy

This is one herbal I have never prepared.  Furthermore, I won't even be preparing it as long as our country holds together.  I'm not interested in having the DEA pay me a visit.  I have attempted growing the flower, but I didn't get the seed in the ground soon enough and so all we got were some leaves.  

It's just a little bit of information on a topic you might be curious about.

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