THE OPIUM FIELDS OF ENGLAND

Heroin-Producing Poppies Grown to Make NHS Pain-Relief Drugs

It is a crop more usually associated with the drug lords of Afghanistan.

But these lilac poppies are growing much closer to home.

Stretching out across acres of rolling Hampshire fields, they will be
harvested later this year to produce pain-relieving drugs for the NHS.

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. 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.

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.'

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FACTFILE:

The seed pod of the opium poppy contains a gummy substance. Opium is
produced from this, and both codeine and morphine are derived from opium

Morphine is further processed by drug barons to make heroin

Afghanistan's poppy fields produced 93 per cent of the world's opium
last year, much of it for the illegal drugs trade

The medicinal properties of opium have been known from ancient times,
and it was used as a narcotic in European cultures as early as 4,000BC