Restaurant added opium to noodles

/ AP photo

A noodle shop owner in Shaanxi province, China has been detaining for spiking food with parts of a poppy plant, from which opium is made, to keep customers coming back for more, the South China Morning Post reports.

The owner confessed that he purchased two kilograms of poppy shells in August and secretly added them the food.

The scheme was discovered when a customer, Liu Juyou, tested positive for narcotics during a routine urine test, which was part of a safe-driving campaign.

Liu was detained earlier this month. He suspected that the noodle shop was the source of the positive test, so he asked family members to eat noodles at the shop and then take a urine test.

The family members tested positive, and called the police. The owner was reportedly detained for ten days.

According to the report, poppy shells were used in a popular hot-pot sauce until the product was banned.

It wasn’t the first time a Chinese restaurateur has spiked the food. Last May, a Shanghai restaurant owner was thrown in jail for adding morphine to soup. In March, restaurant owners were caught using the opiate Narceine in a crayfish dish.