Poppy native to Asia Minor, India and Iran. Some parts of China's drug plantations have a small amount of cultivation. Poppy is a biennial herb of the poppy family. The whole plant pink-green, long oval leaves, embracing the stem and born; summer flowering, single branch head, large and showy, red, purple, white, upward opening. Flowers fall early, and bear globose capsules, containing minute and numerous seeds.

The Chinese medicine to poppy husk into medicine, prescription, also known as "rice shells" or "poppy shells". Harvested in the summer after the "cut tobacco", remove the tip and seeds, dried vinegar fried or honey-roasted spare. The seeds contain 50% oil and can be pressed for oil.

Poppy husk is flat, sour and astringent, poisonous, containing morphine, codeine, Narcotine, poppy alkaloids such as more than 30 kinds of alkaloids, for analgesic, cough, diarrhea medicine, used for lung deficiency, cough, chest and abdominal tendons and bones of all kinds of pain, chronic dysentery and diarrhea; also used for spermatorrhea, spermatorrhea, caused by renal deficiency, and other diseases.

Poppy fruit latex, cut and dried is "opium". It contains 10% of morphine and other alkaloids, can relieve smooth muscle, especially vascular smooth muscle spasm, and can inhibit myocardium, mainly for angina pectoris, arterial embolism and other diseases. But the long-term application of addiction, chronic poisoning, serious harm to the body, become the folk often said "opium ghost". Serious respiratory distress and death. Therefore, China's poppy planting strict control, in addition to medicinal research, a ban on planting.