PENTAGON TELLS SERVICE MEMBERS TO AVOID CONSUMING POPPY SEEDS

Officials concerned they could skew drug test results

The Defense Department has advised service members to avoid eating poppy seeds because officials are concerned they could cause misleading drug test results.

The warning reflects long-standing concerns that people who eat a poppy seed bagel or lemon poppy seed loaf sometimes have drug tests come back positive for codeine or morphine, even if they are not using the drugs.

The Defense Department’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, Gilbert R. Cisneros Jr., issued a memorandum last week directing military departments to advise service members to avoid foods and baked goods containing the seeds out of an “abundance of caution.”

Cisneros acknowledged that the concerns about poppy seeds were “not new.” He said the department’s thresholds for a positive drug test aimed to distinguish morphine and codeine use from poppy seed ingestion.

But recent data had suggested that some poppy seed varieties contained a level of codeine contamination that made it more difficult to identify whether a positive drug test result was from drug use, Cisneros said.

Poppy seeds do not contain opiates, but when they are harvested, they can be contaminated by the morphine, codeine and thebaine that are in a fluid that oozes from the plant.

How much of these opiates winds up on seeds sold in grocery stores or in muffins bought at bakeries varies widely, researchers said.

Michelle Carlin, an assistant professor of toxicology and forensic chemistry at Rutgers University, said she had analyzed bags of poppy seeds from different grocery stores and found that “even within the same bag, there’s a big variation in the amount of morphine, codeine and thebaine.”

A variety of factors affect these levels, including where in the field the poppies were grown and how much sunshine and water was in that area, Carlin said.

To minimize opiate contamination, seeds are supposed to be washed and processed, but that does not always happen. Some seeds are also sold unwashed for people seeking illicit access to opiates without a prescription. The Food and Drug Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment about how it regulates poppy seed processing.