Poppyseeds cost man his license

I thought this only happened on Seinfeld :doh:

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An Austrian driver has lost his license because he failed a drug test after eating a dish containing poppyseeds.

Wolfgang L, 39, had his license withdrawn when a test showed traces of morphine in his urine.

But he denies drug abuse, saying he had recently eaten mohnnudeln, an Austrian speciality consisting of noodles, poppyseeds and fruit.

Reinhard Fous, head police doctor in Vienna, told the Kronenzeitung the man 'wasn't under the influence of drugs' since his blood test came back negative.

Yet, the traces of morphine in his urine showed he wasn't fit to drive, the doctor argued.


http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1181775.html?menu=

Seinfeld - me too! Then she came back menopausal. :doh:

geez, must be some sensitive tests.

Hey,finally something I'm qualified to talk about. I did my master's thesis in forensic chemistry on opiate drug tests. Yes, there is enough morphine in just one normal lemon poppyseed muffin to show up positive on a urine test. The current US laws state that your morphine level has to be above a certain level, about 2000 ppm and then they do a more sensitive test. What needs to be tested for instead of morphine is a drug called 6-monacetyl morphine (6-MAM) which is the first breakdown product from heroin int he body. Heroin is metabolized completely to this substance, morphine, and codeine within 3 hours of ingestion, so it is practically impossible to test for heroin itself. Heroin is a manmade drug, does not occur naturally. 6-MAM can only come from heroin breakdown, so if you have this on board, you have had heroin recently. Other opiates that are legal, but controlled such as morphine, codeine, oxycodone, and hydrocodone (Percoset and Percodan) can also be detected by the current radioimunoassay that is done. In grad school, I developed a test that made it possible to detect much much smaller doses of all 6 of these drugs. It never caught on though because it is expensive. There would be fewer instances of false positives though.