BehindTheMedspeak: Eating two poppy seed bagels CAN make you test positive for narcotics

I thought that this was another of the "alligators in our sewers"-type urban legends until I read Anahad O'Connor's piece on the subject in the January 11 New York Times Science section.

Every week, he takes a claim like this, then investigates it for his "Really?" feature.

He delved into the subject of poppy seeds and heroin, both of which come from the opium poppy, with Dr. Timothy P. Rohrig of the Regional Forensic Science Center in Kansas.

O'Connor wrote,

• "Eating a couple of bagels heavily coated with poppy seeds can result in morphine in a person's system for hours, leading a routine drug test to come back positive."

• Because of this possibility, the federal government recently raised the threshold for opiates in workplace testing to 2,000 nanograms a milliliter, up from 300.

So stick to sesame seeds on judgment day, would be my advice.