This is not an accurate story. Monticello had for a while been concerned about the legality of growing the plant and selling the seeds. They first contacted the Department of Agriculture and the Virginia Attorney General regarding this question. They didn't receive clear guidance, so they then reached out to the DEA regarding the legality. The DEA told them it was illegal but also released a public statement that no enforcement action would take place if they grew them solely for decorative purposes on the estate. Monticello made the decision to go ahead and remove the plants anyways on their own.
You mean some raving diatribe on the Internet is actually total bullshit? Shocking!
In all seriousness, thanks very much for your post, it's the kind of informative content that I really appreciate about HN.
At the same time, this blog post gets to everything I hate about the Internet and online discourse these days: nobody even attempts to argue in good faith anymore. US drug policy over the past century is rife with plenty enough problems that you don't need to blatantly make shit up to get your point across, as this author did.
I was living in Charlottesville at the time and I remember this. Charlottesville had just made national news because of a huge drug bust at UVa (Operation Equinox). Monticello was covering its bases.
Ah, Alternet. I didn't realize they still existed. When I was a news junkie it was one of my sources of information - until I started digging deep and learned how inaccurate it often was.
Also, the headline is self-contradictory. How could it be scrubbed from public memory and then there's an article. Maybe they tried? But apparently that's not really true either.
The alternative facts news-sphere ALWAYS plays the "HERES WHAT THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW but for some reason a random dude on the internet totally uncovered this top secret situation but he doesn't even work for the air national guard or use discord"
Monticello contacted, I'm sure through their legal counsel, the Department of Agriculture which indicated growing the poppies in question was legal and the Attorney General of Virginia's office who indicated that the law was contridictary and unclear. This when they then contacted the DEA for an opinion.
if you're talking about the USDA, it's irrelevant. You might as well ask a cow it's opinion on whether prime rib or sirloin is better. USDA does not prosecute drug crimes. The USDA could also just as easily lie to you if they wanted to.
The USDA does have primary federal law enforcement power for National Forests including drug crimes, but that is irrelevant to this discussion.
The FDA not the DEA is the primary regulator and enforcement agency for poppy seeds intended for human consumption.
The USDA is the primary regulator of seeds intended for planting. Since the seeds being sold at Monticello were sold with the intended for use in the planting of poppies, when surveying for opinions it seems an appropriate agency to get one from.
Do you have evidence/sources for that? I did some searching and couldn't find any primary sources that said growing Papaver somniferum in the United States is legal. On the contrary, nearly every primary source I found said that it is illegal.
The Wikipedia article on the topic says this:
> Though "opium poppy and poppy straw" are listed in Schedule II of the United States' Controlled Substances Act, P. somniferum can be grown legally in the United States as a seed crop or ornamental flower.
> It is legal to grow Papaver somniferum in the United States for garden and seed production purposes; it is illegal to manufacture opium from the poppies.
However, that article doesn't seem to back that up with any source material. On the contrary, it directly contradicts one of its own listed sources, https://web.archive.org/web/20210421145024/http://www.hort.p... , which states "As the peony flowered poppy, the opium poppy is widely grown as an ornamental, even here in the US, where it is illegal to grow."
That is, as best as I could find, growing Papaver somniferum is still technically illegal in the US, but basically all enforcement agencies have said they're OK with ornamental use. Would love to see any contradictory evidence if someone has it.
Weed grower for about ten years here. If you've paid any attention at all to the legal industry, you'll see that there's an endless supply of new "genetics" coming out (99% hype bullshit) and some famous names like "Kush," "Diesel," etc.
These are called cultivars, the same species but much like dog breeds, you can select for attributes like potency, flavor, etc.
I've never seriously tried to grow opium, but I have had poppies in the garden and I've attempted to slice and get a bit of latex from them, and basically the seeds they sell for gardens are a weak cultivar that is not suitable for opium production. If you look at the Wikipedia page it's got a picture of what appears to be an Afghan farmer collecting latex, and you can tell from the photo that this is a heavy latex-producing breed, very different from what we can grow legitimately here.
I'm sure seeds for that cultivar can be acquired fairly easily, but I wouldn't know how.
Based on a link a commenter posted above, part of it is cultivar but a big part of it is also the environment:
> Virginia's climate will not allow opium poppies to mature to a point at which opium could be extracted from their bulbs, Charlottesville Federal Drug Task Force Agent Richard Hudson said. The plants could reach that point in a greenhouse, he said.
It's definitely not the best climate, but I believe any competent grower with knowledge of the specific craft of growing for extraction could do it. I might know someone who might have once attempted to look into getting known-stoned seeds to give it a go, but never found any sort of confirmation that these were the magic beans he was looking for so never made the attempt.
The flowers come up just about everywhere without much effort - same is true of cannabis and tomatoes, but poppies will naturally come back wherever they establish themselves. Yes, the best herb grows wild in places like Jamaica with long summers, but you can grow quite a respectable crop outdoors where I live, about 200km north of North Dakota, especially if you've got a greenhouse, but even without, there are cultivars which are very amenable to short seasons.
Not totally sure poppies completely transfer, knowledge-wise, like weed and tomatoes - if you can grow tomatoes, you can grow weed, by the way. But I'm pretty sure, and the article is seriously hinting, that that is at least somewhat the case, and it's definitely a crop that any competent farmer can just switch to, if their local environment is hospitable to it. I don't doubt that in Jefferson's day it was a more common home remedy than 20th century history books recorded.
When I lived in Morocco, the field behind our house was an opium field.
It wasn't just orange poppies. They were a bunch of colors. Looked great.
My mother grew them in our back yard. My brother and I used to chase each other with dried seed pods. They rattled, and, when you smacked someone, the seeds would explode, getting into everything.
The Supreme Court could have chosen not to interpret the Commerce Clause so broadly to say that not engaging in interstate commerce affects interstate commerce and therefore counts as interstate commerce (IIRC that started with wheat, not drugs), in which case most federal drug laws would not apply unless the activity actually involved interstate commerce. Then an amendment would be needed.
I don't think an amendment was required. Alcohol could have been banned at the time through legislation, it just would have been easier to reverse and maybe less universal.
That’s not correct as far as I understand it. Prior to Wickard v. Filburn the federal government did not have the power to ban substances (since it isn’t explicitly specified in the constitution). If congress had passed a law doing so, that law would have been considered unconstitutional. Wickard v. Filburn is obviously ridiculous and should be overturned, but it never will be.
The way I interpret a decision like that is the court saying "yes the government does have the power to do this and it always has, it is specified in the constitution and if you thought otherwise you've been reading it wrong." It's sort of a pointless philosophical distinction, but I wouldn't say the government didn't have that power before the decision, I'd say they did but they never tried to use it (unless the court was overturning a previous decision).
I'm aware that the Supreme Court sometimes completely changes its mind in a matter of decades, so it's possible a legislative prohibition would have been struck down 20 years before Wickard v. Filburn, but it's also possible the court would have come to the same unanimous decision. I don't know anything about legal history so if there's some obvious reason the 1918 court would have ruled differently then I apologize.
> The way I interpret a decision like that is the court saying "yes the government does have the power to do this and it always has, it is specified in the constitution and if you thought otherwise you've been reading it wrong."
That is indeed the theory but it’s completely fictional.
The amendment was a goal by prohibitionists to ensure the law wouldn't be easily repealed. To their chagrin, they didn't realize the will of the people in banning their ridiculous amendment.
Prohibition obviously reflected the will of the people—it’s impossible to amend the constitution without supermajority support. The Volstead Act was approved by overwhelming majorities of both houses, and then ratified by 46 of 48 states.
It wasn’t “ridiculous.” It was one of the first things women did with the vote. It probably would’ve worked if it hadn’t been for Irish and Italian immigrants.
I think there's more to it than "immigrants love their alcohol so much they started whole criminal enterprises." It's probably coincidental that the biggest names in illicit alcohol during that era happened to be Italian crime family names.
In the south there were so many bootleggers that they used to race each other around tracks to see who had the fastest car. This would eventually become Nascar.
I think it's more accurate to say that there was overwhelming support for Volstead from people in power who were swayed by the narrative that alcohol was draining families of resources and dis-inhibiting otherwise good men from hitting their wives and children. But there were also a lot of people who didn't let alcohol ruin their marriages and family relationships, and those people would eventually get the act repealed.
Prohibition wasn’t repealed because we determined “alcohol isn’t so bad.” To this day, alcohol remains tremendously damaging to women. 70% of sexual assaults involve alcohol use by the perpetrator. 55% of domestic violence incidents involve alcohol use prior to the incident. Obviously that doesn’t exculpate the perpetrators. But those bad people will exist no matter what—alcohol pours fuel on the fire.
We repealed prohibition because it proved unenforceable. And Irish and Italian immigrants had a tremendous amount to do with that, both because of their participation in organized crime and because of their cultural acceptance of alcohol. (To this day, the divide between people who supported temperance and those who got it repealed lives on in who serves grape juice at communion and who serves wine. Even a century of integration later, there’s a marked difference between evangelical Protestants and Catholics in terms of regular alcohol use.)
After all, it’s not like banning alcohol is impossible. Alcohol use is extremely restricted in many countries around the world.
Is German or English beer culture new? They may be culturally less prone to skirting the law than Irish or Italians (want to stress the word culturally here), but I don’t really see how we can attribute it to a cultural difference in the acceptance of alcohol.
Temperance was an outgrowth of religious movements that occurred within American Protestantism in the late 1700s and through the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement. The seeds of this were sown back in Europe (John Wellesley for example) but those groups like Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers who opposed alcohol (and still do) had a lot more influence in America than they did back in Europe. And since the country was new they had a greater ability to reshape the culture.
So the relevant cultural difference is between these American Protestants, who had been diverging from Europe for 100+ years, and immigrants from continental Europe, who hadn’t experienced that cultural change.
Speaking of Appalachian bootleggers, my great grandpa was one. There are ruins far in the woods outside my childhood home when you can see the old infrastructure and a pile of rusty cans that used to be 10 ft high. It's mostly disintegrated now. My great grandpa retired from it when he was visited by some rival Italians who wanted to have exclusive access to him. He was offered the choice to retire or serve them exclusively so he gave up the business and went back to farming.
Everyone reading this who isn’t familiar with Wickard v. Filburn please look it up on Wikipedia. Greater awareness of it would be really helpful. It is a blatantly insane interpretation and a huge amount of power at the federal level is built on top of it.
I’m not sure what you mean? I think that pretty clearly refers to commerce between states. How are you interpreting it differently? They just really casually and implicitly gave the feds the power to regulate all interpersonal transactions within each state? I think they would have said that explicitly if they meant it, no?
"Among the several states" does not conclusively disallow congress from regulating intrastate commerce in my opinion. How does "among" restrict the regulation only to things going between the states? What definition of "among" limits the rest of the clause to only certain interactions involving commerce flowing through multiple of the states?
If I regulate commerce specifically in the state of Virginia, which is a member of the set of states, IMO I am regulating commerce among the states. The rest of that section of the constitution is all about how the Government's laws should be equal across all states, ie there is no favoritism, so that also leads me to believe this could be about keeping the government fair, rather than limited.
Keep in mind a huge point of the Constitution superseding the articles of confederation was that interstate activities were a pain in the ass and trade treaties were a dumpster fire. Giving congress final say over trade in the Union is absolutely compatible with that. It was not a document about keeping the Feds out of the business of the states. It was entirely about giving the federal government MORE power over the affairs of the states because the previous federal government was basically useless and at the whims of powerful state governors who absolutely did not want to stop being the kings of their little fiefdoms.
It was not and is not required! Many states and locations locally banned alcohol before and after prohibition. What did take a constitutional amendment was ending prohibition but only because it was implemented through a constitutional amedment.
It took a constitutional amendment to do it at the federal level. Congress would not have been able to pass such a law constitutionally prior to Wickard v. Filburn.
They weren't bans originally. They were huge taxes that nobody could afford to pay. The bans came later after the supremes gave carte blanche to the feds.
> Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are now deemed illegal
Growing with the intent to produce opium is illegal. By continuing his tradition in the museum, it was deemed a continuation of production for drugs and so probably came under scrutiny. I'm sure they could regrow a garden for decorative purposes if they actually did that and were clear about it.
That's a cool source that contradicts the article posted originally. In yours they say they won't prosecute, but in the article it claims they were low-key threatened into getting rid of the garden. Odd.
Yeah found it after posting the article, although I wouldn't say it contradicts the story (except for the title), this is my interpretation: random DEA agent sees something [1] that looks probably illegal during a visit and notifies Monticello, Monticello then attempts to confirm this with DEA through more official channels, who then clarifies that it is technically illegal but they wont persecute, even then Monticello decides to remove the plants and seeds [2].
1- `A DEA man noticed the store was selling packets of "Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Poppies."`
2- `Nobody told them to do this, but, under the circumstances, no one dared risk the threat`
This is completely untrue. Every major garden supplier will sell them, and there are a number of places where you can find cultivars bred for their alkaloid content. The latter type is perhaps grey-area legal, but definitely still available on the internet.
