Quote:
Originally Posted by WallShadow
To quote from a PBS special on opium:
"The flower is grown mainly by impoverished farmers on small plots in remote regions of the world. It flourishes in dry, warm climates and the vast majority of opium poppies are grown in a narrow, 4,500-mile stretch of mountains extending across southern Asia from Turkey through Pakistan and Laos. Heroin is also increasingly becoming an export from Latin America, notably Colombia. "
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It would seem they got it slightly wrong...
There are opium fields within about 10 minutes of where I'm sitting right now in Tasmania. I can look out my window and see snow just 45 minutes away.
A few years ago I worked at Tasmanian Alkaloids (20 minutes away), a processing facility which I believe is the largest in the southern hemisphere.
The industry is HEAVY monitored and the processing facility has more security than the average prison. The fields on the other hand are protected by nothing more than a four or five strand barbed wire fence with signs every hundred metres or so indicating fines and possible imprisonment. The entire state is patrolled by just a handful of protection officers tasked with ensuring security of those thousands of acres of fields.
Tasmanian winters are WET. It's spring here now, but in the past couple of months we had three floods - this isn't unusual and most people arent' stupid enough to build on, or try to crop on the more flood prone areas. Still, all that rain does have an effect on the higher ground.
Therefore, provided seed can be found, it shouldn't be too hard to produce the poppies. Processing them into something like morphine, codeine or thebaine is another matter.