SEVEN

Practical knowledge is built on the accumulation of things that worked the right way.  Which sounds great, right up until you realize how many things you have try.  For every thing you get right, you generally get a whole lot of things wrong.

Gina and Ray bought all the poppies the greenhouse had, which was a couple dozen, and also bought a few pots, and some soil.  While Ray snored out a few hours on the couch, Gina got the seeds off, pressed them, and walked through a few different steps of refinement.  The result was a kind of grainy putty, the same milky-brown as the stuff we had.  It was, she said, about four times as much as she'd burnt the night before.  Meaning that six poppies made one dose, more or less, if her guess of "one dose" was anything like accurate.  On waking, Ray took it to work, along with a bit more of the original, to compare them while he kept up his usual routine.

Watching Ray dive right in, without any friction, worried at me a little. I shrugged it off, though - I'd done the same, hadn't I?  I'd gone a bit further, really; my normal routine was taking a pretty serious beating.

I was thinking about getting things right, and getting them wrong, though.  And about how to determine which is which, so that your whole method doesn't have hidden flaws.  We'd need blood tests, to watch for buildup toward nitrate poisoning.  We'd want a overdose kit, though I hoped we'd never need it.  We'd need more flowers - way more.  We'd need a monitoring setup; self-reporting journals, at a minimum, but preferably actual sleeping couches.  And we'd either need a long time, or a lot of subjects.

No matter how I sliced it up, money was going to be a thing.  Right now, we were two students operating on scholarship money, and one globe-trotting...   It occured to me that I had no idea how Gina paid for her existence.   So, best to just lay out the starter plan for "what we can do right now with a couple comfy chairs", and the various ways to expand on it, and if anyone could dream up some plan for cash, we'd be doing well.

My general idea was that we could just whip up a few small batches, and then try and get a pharmaceutical company interested.  We get to be the discoverers of this thing, with Gina taking top billing, and we all get rich.  Easy enough.  When I started to lay out this line of thinking for Gina, though, she had other ideas.

"No way, coz.  Any one of those companies would see a military sale as the best bid around.  We might still get a payday, but the stuff would be prohibited - flowers and all - and vanish off the market so fast your head would spin right around."

"So...  What's the goal, then?"

"Herbal medicine, coz.  We will officially be engaging in the hippiest of hippie trades.  Think about it; we can do tests, find volunteers, even do research on dreaming techniques, and nobody will care even a little bit.  If we're just some incense-making dream gurus, nobody legal will ever believe that we're putting lightning in bottles."

"Or at least, they'll be looking for pot."

"Sure thing."

I mentally added a tie-dyed headband to my idea of becoming a labcoated "Q", and went back to explaining our upcoming needs for Gina.  She nodded along, making a list as she went.

"I've got three thousand in the bank, and I could max out my credit at...  another eight thousand past what it's at.  That get us anywhere close?"

"It's more than we need for most of the first runs, to narrow down an okay dose of the stuff you're cooking up right now, get a rough picture of what it's doing.  Not even close to enough for us to hunt side effects, try out a good course of variants, all that.  To do that, we either need a program...  Or, well, you want to be herbal hippies, right?"

"Right."

"After basic tests, when we've got one thing that works okay, and I'm pretty sure it's not gonna kill anyone, we could find you a shop with a big back room.  Incense, meditation mats, and a little lab in the back; flowers everywhere, probably even growing lights inside.  We could take months or years to test variations, while making sales, the whole thing.  But, I mean...   That'd be your whole life, you know?"

"It's already my life, coz.   Sounds pretty sweet, really.   You talking about turning into a lifer, here, too?"

"It wouldn't be that hard for you to stick to a set of best practices for tests, right?  I'd just need to put those together for you, and I could walk anytime; it's not such a big commitment for me."

"Sure thing."

"Okay.  So.  That's a big hit.  I dunno if you could cover setting it up on, what, about eleven thousand?  But it seems like it's a do-able thing, and we've got a couple weeks of the fundamental tests before we should even be thinking about this.  It really should be more; we're talking about a mostly-unknown drug here."

"You'll get your couple weeks.  Gimme a bare-bones shopping list."