All I can say is that this is unfortunate. The underlying story is innocuous, regarding a noodle shop cooking with poppy seeds. But we get the following headline from the freakin’ British news agency BBC:

China: Restaurant ‘sold opium-laced noodles’

The irony would be bad enough if the story was completely accurate, but as I suggested above, it’s actually rather misleading. The facts here do not support the inference that the restaurant in question was doping up his customers, but rather that this was a low-level amount of poppy seed used in the dish:

Police said the unprocessed seeds contain enough opiates to gradually build up in the body and eventually trigger a positive drugs test result.

I suppose in the mind of whatever idiot editor approved this article and wrote the headline, it’s all good ’cause the headline used quotation marks for the opium bit. In other words, it wasn’t the BBC News giving its readers a story about opium in China; no, they were just reporting on what Chinese sources were saying.

{facepalm}

© Stan for China Hearsay, 2014. |
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