Not sure if this is a "Quest Issue" or "Miscellaneous", since it's not the turn-in itself, I'm going with the latter.
I hope I'm not jumping the gun on calling this a bug, but I tried looking for old posts on various EQ sites, and I'm unable to find anything one way or the other on how rare of a drop the Golden Rod is supposed to be, so I started this thread to see other people's experiences:
Golden Rod Thread
Apparently it at least
used to be fairly common, but either its drop rate has been severely lowered, or it's broken and not dropping it all.