Tasmania, the main opium producer in the world

Julian Morgans

"Tasmania currently grows about 50 percent of the world’s legal opium poppies. These produce the morphine for most modern analgesics, as well as thebaine for specialist drugs like buprenorphine and oxycodone. The UN regulates poppy agriculture to keep the plants off the black market, but also to ensure there are enough painkillers to meet world demand. The current problem is that demand has surpassed production, yet Tasmania is just about at capacity. Getting more poppies grown is a bureaucratic and political nightmare, but it looks like one state will take it on. Enter Victoria.

Victoria was already processing a lot of product from Tasmania, plus it has a similar climate, and their recently willing government has sealed the deal. The three companies that rule Tassie’s industry—GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, and TPI Enterprises—are now pushing the final touches through state parliament and are hoping to get plants in the ground this winter. TPI Enterprises has even spent the past weeks holding information nights for Victorian farmers. According to CEO Jarrod Ritchie, they’ve had enough interest to plant between 1,200 and 2,500 hectares this year. “That is compared with around 25,000 in Tasmania, but in my estimate, the industry will be growing 10 percent more of what is already being grown in Tasmania.”

No, you won’t be able to get high. There are a few reasons for this, starting with the fact that the poppies will be grown in secret, isolated farms away from main roads. But the most serious disincentive is that most of the plants will be producing a nasty chemical called thebaine. Thebaine is an alkaloid from the sap of the Papaver somniferum poppy, which becomes morphine as the plant develops. But if you douse the soil in growth regulators, its thebaine never matures, and you’ll end up with a product that requires a lengthy chemical process to become edible. If you try eating it raw, you’ll die a sad, painful death, as a Danish tourist learned this year.

It started when two 26-year-old Danes broke into a farm near Oatlands, about 50 miles north of Hobart, and stole enough poppy heads to boil into a tea. One of them went for a walk while the other stayed back in a camper van to get high but instead became sick and ended up in bed. His friend found him dead the next morning, after he’d suffered convulsions similar to those of strychnine poisoning. That was February 18, and it was the third such death in three years.

“It’s the same way people will always want to drink too much alcohol or drive too fast," Ritchie says simply. “And that’s very much a concern, and there are systems in place to minimize the harm. We’ll be putting in security for field monitoring, appropriate fencing, and signage, because of course we don’t want to see that happening again.”

Tasmania’s opiate security measures have been so successful that heroin is virtually unavailable on the island, which has created a rather ironic misuse of prescription opiates. The state’s paper, the Mercury, last year reported that “Tasmania has the highest abuse rate for the pharmaceutical opiate painkiller Oxycodone, and the second highest abuse of morphine and methadone [in the country].” Also ironic is the fact that a lot of Tasmanian thebaine ends up as Oxycodone, but whether the introduction of a poppy industry into Victoria will affect the state’s taste for prescription drugs is yet to be seen.

So how do Tasmanian farmers feel about losing their monopoly? “Well, there are farmers who have had a protected position and don’t want to compete with Victoria,” admits Ritchie. “And I’m empathetic with that, but restricting the industries growth will only harm it. This is (a) an industry that is a human right and (b) an industry that is growing.”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/australia-is-about-to-grow-even-more-opium-poppies

Forgotten genocide, the slaughter of the native Tasmanians in Australia

D.Antón

The island of Tasmania, an Australian state with an area of ​​68,000 square kilometers and 500,000 inhabitants, is known for being one of the main producers of poppy in the world (to make morphine, codeine and other opium derivatives). It is also known because there is an atmospheric observatory measuring the CO2 content of the atmosphere, the Cape Grim Observatory.
There is another reason why the Cape Grim has historical significance. It is not a technical or scientific reason neither. It is the place where the slaughter occurred that ended the lives of thirty members of the last survivors of the tribe Pennemukeer of the Palawa nation (also known as Tasmanians natives).

On February 10, 1828 four white settlers, who raised sheep, killed with muskets several members of this community who were unarmed and defenseless and threw them from a nearby cliff.
The story of the slaughter is narrated by George Augustus Robinson:
"On the occasion of the slaughter a tribe of natives, composed of women and children, had come to the islands Doughboy. Providence had favored them with good weather. They swam to the island leaving their children on the rocks in the care of the elderly. They had prepared their supply of birds, had been tied with grass, had been towed to shore, and all the tribe sat around the fire sharing the fruits of their hard journey. At that time a group of ferocious barbarians thirsting for the blood of the helpless and harmless people pounced. They fled leaving their provisions. Some were thrown into the sea, others wobbled around the cliff and those who remained were killed by monsters. Those poor creatures who had sought refuge at the top of the rock were pushed to the edge of a horrible precipice, were massacred and their bodies thrown down. I went to the foot of the cliff where the bodies had been dumped, and saw several human bones, some of whom brought with me, and a piece of bloody cliff. As the tide came I hurried away from this Golgotha. "
The bay and cliff where these events occurred is now known as Suicide Bay.
Before the arrival of Europeans in 1642, and the founding of the first British settlement at Risdon Cove in 1803, the native population of the island of Tasmania was estimated between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

Since the early years of British occupation aborigines were enslaved, their women raped, their communities and victims of organized hunts in order to exterminate them. In 1830 there were fewer than 300 individuals (220 or 72 according to various sources).
The last Palawa woman called Truganini died in 1876 completing one of the most efficient genocides in modern history. Some time later, it was learned that another Tasmanian Aboriginal Truganini had survived. This woman, born in Flinders island in Bass Strait, named Fanny Cochrane, escaped the massacre and had 11 children who were the ancestors of contemporary Tasmanian community that still exists in this sea area.
Belying the proclaimed disappearance of ethnic Tasmanian there are currently still 16,000 people who declared descended from the ancient island nation, demanding recognition and claiming their cultural and historical memory. Errol West, eclared,a young man who expresses tasmanian source puts it:
"As the dust blown across the plain
are the people of the Lunar Bird
And yet, there is no one to teach me the songs
that bring the Lunar bird, the fish
Or anything else
That makes me who I am "

From "Chronicles of the human journey", Danilo Antón, Piriguazú Editions.