ROGERS, Ark. (KFSM/CNN) – The parents of a man who overdosed on morphine are trying to get lawmakers to ban the sale of unwashed poppy seeds.
They say their son died from ingesting morphine from seeds he bought legally online.
There are a few things the Hacalas are trying to do. This includes preventing the sale of unwashed poppy seeds and creating an awareness.
They were recently in Washington speaking with lawmakers and did a facetime interview with 5 News.
Steve Hacala said, “What we found everywhere we go, like us, we were unaware that unwashed poppy seeds and poppy seed tea, or opium tea, was even a thing. And so we’re really trying to educate across a number of different avenues.”
The Hacalas say their son Steven was found unresponsive by his roommate two years ago.
When they went through his apartment, the only suspicious things they found were a bag of poppy seeds and a water bottle filled with them.
Steve Hacala explained, “At the time, I asked the detective, and my doctor friend if we thought this could have anything to do with his passing and we all said, ‘how could it have been?'”
A toxicology report later showed that Steven died from a morphine overdose that he got from drinking the poppy seed tea, seeds Steven bought online.
Steve Hacala says their research has shown them that unwashed poppy seeds can have an opium latex on them that are activated during a tea brewing process. A lethal dose of morphine is about 200 milligrams.
It’s a topic that Arkansas State Senator Tom Cotton has recently tackled. He said, “Researchers at Sam Houston State University, commissioned by the Hacalas, concluded that there were about
6,000 milligrams of morphine in that five-pound bag of seeds that Stephen bought. That’s over 30 times the lethal dose.”
Senator Cotton recently spoke to the Senate floor about the Hacalas’ story. He announced he too will work to ban unwashed seeds entirely.
The Hacalas are not trying to get rid of all poppy seeds, they say the unknown danger lies with those seeds that are unwashed. “The problem is the morphine concentrations vary so much between manufacturer, country of origin, harvest season, that you’re really playing Russian Roulette with the dosage,” Steve Hacala said. “You just don’t know what you’re getting, and that’s what make them so dangerous.”
Amazon has agreed to stop selling poppy seeds labeled as unwashed.
That may not stop the problem, though, because many poppy seeds for sale on the internet do not specify whether they are washed or unwashed.
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