The invention discloses a method for rapidly identifying illegally added poppy shells in herbal tea. The method comprises the following steps: (1) carrying out ultrasonic treatment on a liquid herbal tea sample to obtain a herbal tea sample, regulating the herbal tea sample to be slightly alkaline, adding an organic solvent and sodium chloride, carrying out vortex extraction, centrifuging, layering, adding an ammonium acetate solution into supernatant, and uniformly mixing, thereby obtaining to-be-tested liquid; or adding an organic solvent into a solid herbal tea sample, carrying out ultrasonic treatment, cooling an extracting solution to room temperature, making up to constant volume, adding an ammonium acetate solution into the extracting solution, and uniformly mixing, thereby obtaining to-be-tested liquid; and (2) filtering the to-be-tested liquid by virtue of an organic phase filter membrane, with an acetic acid-methanol solution and an ammonium acetate solution as a mobile phase, carrying out reversed phase chromatographic column separation, and detecting five main ingredients, namely morphine, codeine, thebaine, papaverine and narcotine, in the poppy shells on eluent by adopting an ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandom mass spectrometer. The method disclosed by the invention has the advantages that pretreatment is simple and rapid, qualitative and quantitative treatment is accurate, and the illegally added poppy shell ingredients in the herbal tea can be rapidly and reliably detected.