Inside Poppy | Documentary Idea

by Clifford Edward Green III
(Boise Idaho)

Poppy Heads

My documentary idea centers on the irony of a recovering heroin and morphine addict's discovery that Morphine, known as "God's Own Medicine", a compound of notorious and glorious importance to humankind both historically, in the present day, and now with new novel potential for the future, is actually an ENDOGENOUS component of human and animal nervous systems.

My interests in this field of study started after a period of active heroin addiction gave way to a series of attempts at seeking formal treatments and moving on to experimenting with various self treatments. I realized on this path of research via phytochemical and ethnobotanical study of data that certain opium alkaloids , and not just any opium alkaloids but the very intermediate isoquinoline alkaloids of importance in the chain of biosynthetic pathway production of the opium plants components, codeine and morphine had been found in plants including other non controlled poppy plants, but also other plants unrelated to the poppy family.

Further study suggested possibly that animals and humans were either consuming these intermediates in the food supply and somehow metabolically producing morphine as a byproduct of feeding, or quite incredulously to me at the time, producing said compounds endogenously as a component of normal or abnormal physiological means.

It was almost too much to consider, and raised serious questions of doubt and wonder.

A few years later, chasing more data, and now completely "clean" of opiates for 2 years ( or so I thought) after a decade of near constant use, I finally caught up with the data, that for some reason was not being fully realized by the global medical establishments, though having been empirically confirmed, that production of the same biosynthetic chain of alkaloidal compounds that are produced in the opium poppy that ends in the production of morphine is a natural process of human and probably most animals physiology.

Reaching back nearly 60 years, the data trail starts building within the medical establishment, and seems to suggest that morphine is not just involved with the control of pain sensation, but rather is involved with a larger array of physiological systems including immunity, memory and brain development, and possibly could potentially be implicated in the development of diseases or conditions. Is it possible that the re evaluation of a drug that has been around as a treatment for pain control for 200 years and for a lesser time as a tool for stabilizing shock patients and heart attack victims lead to new treatment protocols or as a target compound for new drug discovery for diseases and or conditions that have defied current treatments?

And disturbingly, if indeed an empirical discovery, why does a recent behavioral health study publish a report that focus's on questioning why the modern medical establishment either resists or as the authors state, lack the ability to accept an empirical finding of such importance?

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