HEY CHIEF: LOOKING FOR THE CITY'S SEEDY UNDERBELLY?

Not wishing to upset Toronto's new police chief on only his fourth day
on the job - he's hardly had a chance to find the cafeteria - but this
week's Economist reports that the war against cocaine has been so
effective that coca farmers in South America are switching to other
crops. Cultivation of opium poppies, unknown in Colombia in 1990, has
risen to more than 6,000 hectares.

This is the poppy - Papaver, botanically; Linnaeus classified as
somniferum, "sleep inducing." A source of heroin right in this hemisphere.

A police chief who said at his swearing-in that he already goes to bed
alarmed about violence might find this news induces - instead of sleep
- - the screaming meemies when he starts thinking about the additional
violence that will ravage the city if these poppies turn out to be the
floral equivalent of killer bees swarming inexorably in our direction.

But suppose the chief makes good on his promise "to spend as little
time in my office as I have to." To calm his sleep-starved nerves, he
might spend some of this out-of-office time strolling through his
bailiwick, admiring the local colour, marvelling at its perhaps
unexpected beauty - it is, after all, 10 minutes to springtime and the
neighbourhoods are revving up to bloom.

And which blooms will be among the most brilliant when they reach full
glory? Papaver somniferum. The opium poppy. Or, as we think of it
around here, the "common" or "garden variety."

Red as sin mostly, but not always. The variety out my back window is
Double Salmon, its pink so intense the image glows on the retina long
after the last gleam of summer has drained from the year. Grew them
from seed. Bought the seed off the rack at the garden supply. They
spread like mad. Killer bees are going to have to hurry to catch up.
The opium poppy nods everywhere around us, and has since York was even
muddier.

Anybody who thought Asia's Golden Triangle was unique wasn't much of a
gardener. An authority as conservative as Thomas' Perennial Garden
Plants, Third Edition, says the "flamboyant, sun-loving" poppy
(technically an annual, it reseeds itself) thrives in "deep soil, poor
and dry rather than rich, and certainly not moist;" the basic stuff
retreating glaciers left in what gardeners classify as Climatic Zone
6, which turns out to be an almost exact overlay of what boosters call
the Golden Horseshoe. The chief might wonder if this is why. Anyway,
there's Toronto, smack in the middle.

Don't confuse it with Europe's wild "In Flanders Fields" poppies, or
with the dinky Icelandic and California poppies that show up here and
there but are no use at all when it comes to producing morphine, the
first plant alkaloid ever isolated and the one that spurred scientists
to tweak, from other plants, other alkaloids: quinine, cocaine itself,
nicotine and the extremely popular caffeine.

Its journey was civilization's. From Sumeria (4000 B.C.; they called
it "the flower of joy"), to Assyria, to Babylon, to Egypt where
Alexander the Great thought it worth carrying to Persia and India;
blown from there by the winds of trade to Greece.

Pliny prescribed it to Romans as a treatment for dandruff, abscesses,
elephantiasis, carbuncles, liver complaints, epilepsy, scorpion bites,
the pain of stab wounds, and whatever else ailed them.

Victorian womanhood would have become extinct without laudanum to ease
its vapours. The British Empire would have wasted away a lot sooner if
it hadn't forced China to buy opium. The Canadian Pacific Railway
would never have got built if the navvies didn't have something to
smoke that made them dream they'd been fed.

Internet access means you don't even have to go to a garden supply,
providing you are 21 and the seeds are "Not intended for illegal use."
Searching under "papaver" and "somniferum" yields 5,409 sites,
although there is some overlap, such as the U.S. government's drug
enforcement Bulletin On Narcotics 1957, the Bulletin On Narcotics
1978, and so on. In the 1980 Bulletin, "fifty-five commercially
available herbicides are evaluated for possible use to destroy illicit
opium crops."

A police chief concerned for the well-being of his citizens might have
no choice but to demand a budget increase of $750 million to equip
botanically trained officers with hoes and green rubber boots. The
Horticulture Crimes Unit. (Gag posted in the unit's squadroom: "Is
that your dibber in your holster, or are you just glad to arrest me?")