This is a good line of questioning for almost any legality argument. (It's used more often on weapons: if people can agree that pocket doomsday devices should b

This is a good line of questioning for almost any legality argument. (It's used more often on weapons: if people can agree that pocket doomsday devices should be regulated, there's at least some common starting point for discussion.) After all, we can imagine plants far more dangerous than poppies, too. Opium is a precursor to much stronger opioids, and ergot contains hallucinogenic lysergic acid, a precursor to LSD. Even nutmeg contains low doses of a psychedelic precursor to MDMA analogues. If we discovered a strain of plant which produced current synthetics like heroin or LSD, would that change one's answer? What if it produced fentanyl, or something else potent enough to blur the line between drug and poison? "Plants are wrong to regulate" and "plants are too hard to regulate" still seem like possible answers there; after all we don't regulate straightforwardly highly poisonous plants. But it's an instructive starting point for how much weight we're actually giving to natural origins, as opposed to safety or difficulty of regulation.