Tasmania’s opium poppy growers face trouble ahead

IT supplies up to half the world’s legal opiates, but Tasmania’s poppy industry sees danger ahead.

TWAM-20150307 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 7 March 2015 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION Poppies in a farm at Cressy for Tasmanian Country. Pic : News

PERCHED in a corner of Keith Rice’s office, atop a cupboard and behind a bright yellow hard-hat, sits an old white sign that warns of grave peril. DANGER. Prohibited area. KEEP OUT. Trespassers ­prosecuted.

In front of it, an updated version includes a skull-and-crossbones captioned POISON. In bold red text, the bottom of the new sign reads: ILLEGAL use of crop has caused DEATH. This recent shift in tense — “may cause” to “has caused” — came after three deaths from poppy misuse in the last three years here in Tasmania. Clearly, something had to change, beginning with the signage that borders roadside poppy crops.

Rice, chief executive of Poppy Growers ­Tasmania, keeps glancing at the sign as we chat over coffee on a cool Launceston morning. A tall 66-year-old with tanned features and thinning white hair, he’s talking me through the complex web of politics, painkillers and, more recently, protectionism in which he has been involved for nearly 30 years.

Above Rice’s desk hangs a wall calendar ­bearing a colour photograph of green countryside flanked by snowy mountaintops, as well as the name of Tasmanian Alkaloids, one of two pharmaceutical companies to have invested heavily in the poppy industry. It has been a big earner for the state, which grows up to 50 per cent of the planet’s legal ­opiates — from which morphine, codeine and thebaine can be extracted — that relieve the pain of humans throughout the world in the form of medicines such as OxyContin and Nurofen Plus. The warning signs are required by law to be displayed on all ­roadside paddocks to deter would-be drug experimenters from picking poppy heads and brewing the ill-gotten plants into a tea. “It’s a dangerous crop because you don’t know the alkaloid content,” says Rice. “Thebaine is like strychnine in your system.”

Tasmania produces around 90 per cent of the world’s thebaine, which causes convulsions in humans at high doses. In the past two decades thebaine production has eclipsed the old fav­ourite, morphine. A more effective painkiller, ­thebaine is also much more dangerous, as two Danish backpackers found last February after stealing 40 poppy heads from a farm near ­Oatlands, in the centre of the state. The pair brewed the plant into a tea; one of the drinkers, a 26-year-old male, fell asleep and never awoke. In November 2012, morphine toxicity also killed a 17-year-old who stole five kilograms of poppy capsules from a farm at Lewisham, near Hobart, and consumed a poppy tea. In February 2011, a 50-year old man died in similar circumstances in the Launceston suburb of Ravenswood.

Tasmania’s $100 million dollar poppy ­industry is hidden in plain sight: drive north from Hobart towards Launceston in the ­summer and rolling fields of white, pink and purple flowers dot the landscape. At its peak a few years ago, 30,000ha of poppies were planted in a season; that number is now closer to 20,000ha per year due to a dip in world demand following changes in US prescription policies arising from drug abuse.

The pharmaceutical companies who pay farmers to grow their products have a long ­history on the island, but mainland state ­governments have been paying attention to the economic consistency of Tasmania’s poppy crop, too. Last September, then federal health minister Peter Dutton wrote to his state and ­territory counterparts asking them to revise a 43-year-old agreement that has restricted poppy production to the island. Soon after, legislation was passed in Victoria and the Northern ­Territory that allowed the narcotics to be grown under strict licensing conditions following small-scale commercial trials during the 2013-14 season.

It’s a worrying development for Tasmanian farmers who for more than four decades had cornered a secure and lucrative market. The path of Tasmania’s poppy industry so far has been one of prosperity and productivity, with the occasional pothole when misuse of the crop has caused death, or when heavy rains have ruined crops or a mildew outbreak occurs, as it did last November. The great unknown is how big a pothole the mainland expansion will be in the state’s proud history of painkiller production.

Before he began working at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) 14 years ago, Rohan Kile snapped his tibia during an Aussie rules match. “The lady in the kiosk heard my leg break, so it must have been something,” he says. When he was administered morphine intravenously in ­hospital, it was his first and only first-hand experience with the global pharmaceutical products that occupy his working weeks. “At the time, it was blessed relief,” the 43-year-old says. “I didn’t care where it came from.” Now, as head of crop supply for GSK’s ­Tasmanian operation, Kile oversees 350 ­growers and about 9000ha of an annual crop that will eventually be pressed into pain pills and sold throughout the world.

Security conditions at GSK’s facility at Latrobe, 10km southeast of Devonport, are strict. Since I’m only allowed to see inside Kile’s office and the bathroom, he takes me for a tour of the surrounding farmlands. “Poppies are the quiet achiever of Tasmanian agriculture,” he says as we hop into his four-wheel drive. “We tend to hide our light under a bushel, so to speak, despite the $80-100 million farmgate value of the crop.”

These figures ensure that the plant is the third-largest contributor to the state’s ­primary production — behind beef and dairy, but far ahead of the fruit for which the state has long been affectionately known. “The ‘Apple Isle’ nickname is a hangover from generations past,” says Kile. Given that apples now contribute just $45 million to the state economy, ­perhaps The Poppy Isle might be a more apt nickname for Tasmania.

On a nearby property we meet 42-year-old owner Stuart Greenhill, whose family has ­decades of history growing for GSK; last season, he grew 100ha for Glaxo and Tasmanian Alkaloids, the state’s other major grower (a subsidiary of pharma giant Johnson & Johnson). While a chilly wind whistles past our vehicles, Greenhill tucks his hands into his jeans pockets and tells me that poppies and vegetables such as onions and potatoes are “reasonably similar” to grow. What about the potential for theft and abuse of his crops? “The dark side?” he asks, with a twinkle in his bright blue eyes. “There’s no theft here. We’re in a fairly secure place. If I saw a stranger in one of our poppy fields, I’d stop and talk to them. If I saw a stranger in one of our vegetable paddocks, I probably wouldn’t.”

When I raise the pressing issue of pharmaceutical companies growing poppies on the mainland, Greenhill is diplomatic. “It’s not my business to tell those businesses how to run their business,” he says with a shrug. “I’m proud of what poppies have contributed to Tasmania, and if there’s an expansion opportunity for other states, that has to be good for Australia.”

GSK’s Kile chooses his next words carefully, not wanting to get one of his growers off-side. “For us, the Victorian option is certainly not a replacement for any of our business here — it’s supplementary. It’s been part of our longer-term strategy for a while; it’s part of our risk mitigation for the future,” says Kile, adding: “But Tasmania is the best place in the world to grow poppies.”

Tasmania’s relationship with the beautiful, deadly crop stretches back to the middle of last century, when Britain became concerned that Allied morphine supplies had been exhausted during World War II. Looking for a secure, friendly government to trial the crop, the ­British agricultural scientist Stephen King undertook a reconnaissance mission for the Glaxo Group in the early 1960s, running trials in Western ­Australia, South Australia, NSW and Tasmania. The island state was the clear winner due to its high productivity, relatively secure island status and a climate that suited the temperamental plant.

Brian Frappell played a key part in the ­industry’s first decade. Now 82 and wearing a hearing aid, the tall, thin retiree with neatly combed white hair and a bushy moustache tells me that he was working for the state Department of Agriculture when the poppy-supervising role came up. From the beginning it was understood that the potential for misuse set this crop apart from onions, carrots and peas. To safeguard against curious interlopers, it was dubbed “oil poppies” in official guidebooks distributed to farmers; the word “opium” was never used publicly. For the first year of Frappell’s trials, nobody outside the department knew of the poppies’ existence. This was purely a ­gentlemen’s agreement, recalls Frappell with a laugh at his home in Devonport; no one was sworn to secrecy or signed a non-disclosure agreement, as would be the case nowadays.

A level of guardedness continues today in the persona of Jeremy Rockliff, Tasmania’s deputy premier and minister for primary industries, who seems anxious about staying on-message when we meet in a cafe not far from the ­Devonport waterfront. Rockliff’s father Rick has been growing the crop for 40 years and holds a senior role with Tasmanian Alkaloids. When I mention the commercial expansion to the mainland, Rockliff stiffens. He’d called, unsuccessfully, for a five-year moratorium on poppy cropping outside Tasmania.

“This is not a protectionist view,” he says. “We just don’t want our farmers disadvantaged. It hasn’t been well thought-through. Poppies represent cultural importance to Tasmania, and a great collaboration with the Poppy Advisory and Control Board, police, and farmers to ­protect the industry through a robust security regime,” he says.

I decide to investigate the “dark side”, as Greenhill puts it, and arrange to meet “Ted”, a stocky, pleasant man in his late 40s with cigarettes on his breath who asks that I not use his real name. “The first time I tried poppy tea at 17, I ended up at the local hospital and had my stomach pumped,” he says. “I didn’t touch it again for nearly a decade, after I’d smoked opium in Thailand.” By that point, Ted knew a bit more about the drug, and since his friends were into it, too, he was drawn into the small community that headed out into the Tasmanian countryside during the annual flowering season.

“If you just pulled up in a car outside a fence, half the time there’d be a police car there quickly,” he says with a smile. “You do get a bit ingenious in your ways, by parking and walking a few miles instead. We got smarter about it: rather than picking a big hole in the middle of a field, you keep it neat around the sides instead.” On a few occasions, he slipped a hundred dollar bill in the letterbox of farmers whose poppy capsules he’d appropriated.

Tasmania Police say that between July 2013 and January 2014 there were 13 poppy inter­ferences, with an estimated 2735 plants stolen. The five-year average is 2423. Ted is surprised by these low numbers. “I would’ve thought there’d be more than that,” he says, eyebrows raised. By his estimate, a garbage bag full of poppy heads will contain between 300 and 400 capsules. “The onus is on the farmers to report the thefts; maybe they’d rather not do the paperwork. I could think of 13 people that I know who would’ve grabbed some [last season].”

Things have become much trickier for Ted and his associates since thebaine crops have come to prominence, however. “Now you have to grab a sample and figure out if it’s morphine. It doesn’t make much sense to spend three hours picking [the wrong] crop.”

Ted’s off-label use of the state’s opiate crop has been curtailed of late, however, as he received a suspended sentence from police after he was found in possession of around 200 grams of tar and charged with manufacturing for personal use. Despite his fondness for the drug, the prevalence of thebaine poppies has discouraged older users like Ted. “Every year, the young experimenters hit the fields. Twenty years ago, there were only morphine poppies. Now, you can’t tell the difference between morphine and thebaine.” Ted compares this risk to taking a sip from a mystery drink and “not knowing whether you’ll get light beer or overproof rum”.

At a high-security facility in the central northern town of Westbury, Tasmanian ­Alkaloids field operations manager Rick ­Rockliff gestures towards a series of nondescript, sun-baked steel sheds and explains that, since 1975, the company’s entire production process has been managed here on-site by around 200 employees. After poppy capsules are harvested from the fields in the summer, they’re transported to Westbury in sealed trucks. The seeds are then separated from the capsules in an extraction process that results in “poppy straw concentrate”, a pelletised form of the crop. (GSK’s alkaloid extraction factory is located offshore, in the small Victorian coastal town of Port Fairy.) This pelletised product is then airfreighted to customers throughout the world, who turn the refined opiate into prescription painkillers.

Tasmanian Alkaloids developed a major breakthrough in 1997 with its high-concentration thebaine poppy, which has been in high demand ever since. “It’s a better form of pain control,” Rockliff explains. “I wouldn’t be here talking now if it wasn’t for thebaine, because anybody can produce morphine.” Until that time, most of the world’s thebaine had been derived from Indian opium. A company agronomist, Dr Tony Fist, was the brain behind the selective breeding of the thebaine-rich plant, which was dubbed ‘Norman’.” “Norman allowed us to pay growers more, and to attract better growers with more land,” says Rockliff.

Last year was the first year that Tasmanian Alkaloids opted not to grow morphine poppies; its US parent company, Johnson & Johnson, has calculated its requirement of 11,000ha of thebaine to meet global customers’ demands. “We got close to 20,000ha a few years ago, but productivity has increased,” Rockliff says. “As we get more kilograms [of poppy straw concentrate] per hectare, we need to grow less.”

The recent scramble to secure poppy cropping land on mainland Australia has largely been driven by the processing company TPI Enterprises, which has argued that isolating the crop to Tasmania had constrained its business. It announced in February that up to 200ha was being harvested in Victoria this season, with expectations that would increase to 4000ha this year. Plantings are also expected at Tipperary station in the Northern Territory this year.

From his office in Launceston, Keith Rice is cautiously optimistic that the crop will remain on the island. “Sometimes I think we overlook the fact that we’re this small island at the end of the world, yet we’re world leaders,” says the Poppy Growers Tasmania chief executive. “But if it’s going to be grown elsewhere, outside ­Tasmania, it must be grown on mainland ­Australia. The people of Australia have supported Tasmania in growing this crop for the last 40 years; they should have the first opportunity to grow the crop.” As he finishes this sentence, his eyes once again settle on the sign propped up in the corner: DANGER.