The commercially important crop of opium poppy is grown for production of alkaloids. These alkaloids are now favoured to be extracted from dry capsules due to constraint of manual labour rather than from latex as practised earlier. However, due to presence of bound form of alkaloids in capsules, the process of extraction complicates. Hence, a method has been developed for the extraction of alkaloids from the poppy straw and analysed over HPLC. The lanced and unlanced dried capsules of four promising varieties alongwith two control varieties, were analysed for the spectrum of five major alkaloids by the metlwd developed by us. It was observed that unlanced capsules have greater proportion of alkaloid contents in comparison to lanced capsules. Hence, unlanced capsules of opium poppy can be used for better production of alkaloids.
