The idea that a real, scientific drug test can be led astray by the simple poppy seed seems like prime ammunition for an urban legend, on par with Mountain Dew’s artificial coloring allegedly shrinking your balls, the foremost medical concern of my sixth-grade class. After all, we’re talking modern science, with microscopes and test tubes and everything. This isn’t an old hybrid barber-surgeon knocking your knee with a rubber mallet and pronouncing you haunted. Surely these tests would be sensitive enough to tell the difference between unadulterated poppy seed and straight-up opium.
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Which, if you don’t know, is the heart of the matter here. Opium, the preferred cargo of cartoonishly long pipes the world over, is indeed derived from the poppy plant. (For Game of Thrones heads, the “milk of the poppy” isn’t a fantasy concoction at all.) Of course, that same plant provides a seed commonly rolled onto the outside of a collection of baked goods, ones common enough that it’s a perfectly reasonable breakfast for someone to eat without a second thought before heading to their drug test. I mean, the two things wouldn’t seem to intersect, given that a poppy-seed bun doesn’t send you crashing into the nearest chaise lounge.
Well, to my surprise, this is, in fact, a genuine issue.
Because the tests are engineered to pick up the faintest sniff of opiates from desperate, Gatorade-chugging drug users, it doesn’t take very much to set them off. It’s not contained to cheapie at-home kits, either. Even the U.S. military warns its members to avoid poppy seeds before their drug tests.
Now, if you’re a true poppy-seed fiend, you might be wondering: Exactly how many seeds can I tank before I’m pissing positive?
Well, per a study in Forensic Science International, the universally accepted cutoff for opiates coming up as a yes is 300 nanograms per milliliter. To arrive at this conclusion, they fed people poppy-seed rolls and poppy-seed cake and then tested their urine. It only took two poppy-seed rolls or a single slice of poppy-seed cake before their test subjects were losing their security clearance.
Though they note that the ability to process poppy seeds changes person to person, the most helpful result came from a subject who tested at 302.1 nanograms per milliliter in the two hours following a piece of poppy-seed cake, or right at the legal limit. The amount they’d ingested came out to 0.07 grams of poppy seeds per 1 kilogram of body weight, so that seems to be a possible baseline, if you insist on having some seeds pre-test.
All of which is to say, you don’t have to try particularly hard to flunk. For someone like myself, weighing in at roughly 100 kilograms, anything over 7 grams is playing with fire. And so, according to USDA Food Data, I’d cross the threshold somewhere between my second and third teaspoon of seeds.