(This is an excerpt from the book ‘Locusts on the Horizon‘ from the chapter titled ‘Health, Medicine, & Sanitation’.)

Having pain killers, seriously strong ones, not Tylenol or aspirin, can be very important, especially if surgery is called for. Other grievous injuries could also warrant a high end painkiller, such as when a major fracture needs repair. Those dying from terminal illness will also need something effective to put away the pain.

In a long term situation, the need for this can become acute. Even the Federal government recognizes this, and as part of their planning in the Cold War, they kept an entire grain elevator in Colorado filled with opium poppy seed as part of the USA’s strategic reserve.

Unfortunately, we live in an era of massive drug abuse, and where American law enforcement has gone somewhat mental on trying to keep people away from having high end painkillers.

The result is that unless you have a real prescription and an immediate need for these drugs, obtaining them and storing them as a personal stockpile can be tricky and risky, even if you plan on using them only for legitimate medical purposes.

So, what do people do in the long term, during a prolonged crisis, especially if it is too difficult to stockpile much of these beforehand?

Well, learning hypnosis can be surprisingly effective in many situations. It’s something to seriously look into. Unfortunately, it requires a fair amount of training and practice. There is also the fact that its effectiveness can vary greatly between individuals.

Then, there is also the story of Charlie Monoxide.

This is a true story, and Charlie Monoxide wasn’t his real, legal name, it was his ‘street name’.

Charlie was quite the character, an aging punk rocker covered in tattoos who had been immersed in the hard rock fueled counterculture since the 1970’s. He had seen a lot and done a lot. He had led an interesting life, to say the least.

By the mid-1990’s Charlie had a problem. He was dying slowly of cancer, and it was terminal. Charlie had gotten to the point where he was starting to need a regular supply of serious pain killers, and he knew it was only going to get worse.

Not wanting to spend a fortune on high end, prescription pain killers and not having the fortune to pay for it anyway (or health insurance for that matter), Charlie came up with a very Charlie solution to the situation.

Opting for what he called ‘herbal medicine’, he planted a large garden of opium poppy plants in his back yard. Charlie needed to plant a little extra, because he knew that there would come a point where he wouldn’t be able to garden anymore before he went to the great rock concert in the sky. So, he was planning ahead.

You see, the opium poppy is just a flower, and the seeds can even be bought online. The flowers are actually quite pretty and ornamental. When you see the large flower bulbs, you slice them lightly with a razor blade and collect the milky sap that seeps out of the cut, kind of like a milkweed. That collected sap is opium. It’s rather simple, actually, when you get right down to it.

This is what Charlie was using to cure his pain with. You can process opium to make morphine, which has long been both a powerful medical anesthetic and a powerful painkiller prescribed to terminal cancer patients. However, Charlie just stayed with the original, organic product and it worked well for him.

Things were going smooth, until one day Charlie got into a heated argument with his girlfriend over something inconsequential, as such arguments often are.  She storms off yelling that she is going to call the cops on him for all of his marijuana plants.

Oh yes, Charlie was also growing pot with an indoor growing operation with grow lights….. oops.

So, he calls a buddy who promptly shows up with a large van and hauls off all of the pot plants.

Not long after all of the pot plants are gone, along comes the gallant folks from the Sheriff’s department of Maricopa County, Arizona, who immediately proceed to comb through the house and the property looking for pot plants.

There Charlie was, sitting on his back porch, watching  Sheriff deputies carefully walking amongst the rows of his three hundred opium poppy plants, looking for illegal hemp cultivation. They were quite polite and took great care not to damage the pretty flowers in their nice, neat rows.

Not finding any pot plants, the gallant folks from the Sheriff’s department of Maricopa County, Arizona, began to leave and one of them smiled at Charlie and said, “Hey, those are pretty flowers you have there in your garden.”

Yes, pretty flowers, indeed. Rest in peace, Charlie.

© Plan B Writer’s Alliance – Permission to copy and reprint this article is given so long as reference to the original author and the website http://www.locustsonthehorizon.com are mentioned.