Just so you know, there is no such thing as “California Poppy Opium”. California poppies are apparently nonnarcotic and contain very little alkaloids, which in turn would make “California Poppy Opium” almost impossible to make (I think). California Poppies are, however, a close cousin to the opium poppy, of which the extremely narcotic opium is obviously derived from.

However, since I’m playing around with the fiction part of Moose River’s realistic fiction genre, I rewrote the nature and history of the California Poppy. In the story, California Poppies ARE a narcotic and the New World equivilent of the Opium poppy in the Old World. And like how the opium poppy influenced in Old World affairs, the California Poppy affected Native American history and European Colonization. In fact, during the Indian Wars, Native Americans fighting the US Army were able to trade California Poppy opium for adequate weapons and finances which supported their defense. This allowed the Indian Wars to end in a draw and for millions upon millions of Native Americans to survive the wars unscathed. This also explains why Native Americans have a much larger presence in the story than in real life.

Opium in the story, however, is similar to reality in terms of legality; it’s illegal to sell/posess/use/etc. However, it’s way too abundant for the local government to supress, so it’s extremely avaliable. The potency of California poppy opium isn’t as strong as Opium poppy opium, thus Navy’s complaint.

But once again I remind you that knowing this information should NOT affect your being able to read the story; it should make sense without knowing the background history. I do however like to drop obviously glaring “errors” into the story (like “California poppy opium” and President Gore) just to get the point across that this world is slightly different than real reality and that, in spite of it all, things remain the same.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 19:31 and is filed under Chapter 4, Shea, Navy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.