Poppy Pain-Relief Crop

Opium poppies are being grown for pain relief drugs in England. According the Daily Mail June 23, 2008 article,("The Opium Fields of England") "Identical to the plant used to produce heroin, they are becoming an increasingly visible crop in the British countryside. Covering more than 6,400 acres on around a dozen farms in Hampshire, Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire, the flowers are harvested in the late summer. The heads are dried and the seeds -- up to 10,000 in a single flower - -- removed from the capsules for use in the food industry. But it is in the seed pods that the important chemicals are found, and the pods are chopped, dried and turned into pellets in order to be transported. The pellets are then sent to a processing plant in Scotland."

The article states, "This year's crop will be made into more than 100 tons of morphine and codeine. Extracting opium from the poppies and turning it into morphine -- or heroin -- is so complex and expensive that growers are confident the flowers will not be pilfered by enterprising drug dealers. The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, was first grown commercially on British farms in 2002 and is a different species to the common wild red poppy which contains no morphine at all. The owner of this farm in Hampshire has converted a quarter of his 1,000-acre farm to produce poppies."

The article adds, "There is a worldwide shortage of morphine, which has traditionally been imported to the West from India and Tasmania, and this has plagued the NHS for several years. Secrecy surrounds the locations where poppies are planted, and farmers are simply required to prepare their land and watch the poppies grow, while the drug company takes care of harvesting and transportation. A spokesman for chemical company Macfarlan Smith, which manufactures the medicine, said: 'It is very important that we are able to source and cultivate an important medicine in this country instead of relying on supplies from elsewhere."