If poppies can grow all over the world, why is it that opium production is so heavily concentrated in Afghanistan?
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They’re grown pretty extensively in Tasmania, Australia. The fields are surrounded by powered fences and everything is heavily regulated. There are massive fines for entering the fields.
That said, they grow next to highways and look cool af.
A friend used to be an inspector.
I’ll never forget a atory i read on here about this journalist who wanted to write a story about Poppy Pod Tea.
So he found some decorative store that sold things like dried plants to put in decorative vases, and got some poppy pods from them. They shipped him his pods all wrapped up nice and safe from breakage in shipping. He then proceeded to make his tea and enjoyed it so much, he ordered some more….and then some more….and then some more. Pretty soon it was a weekly shipment. The Decorative store must have caught on at some point what they guy was using them for, so toward the end, they just stopped bothering with all the safe shipping packing around the pods and just started to chuck them in a box, hahaha.
Anyways, his story turned out way different then he thought it would – it turned into the above journey and exploration of poppy tea.
Similarly the majority of the worlds saffron is grown in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a HORRIBLE climate to grow saffron in BUT it requires a ton of non automatible labor to pick the two stamens from each toxic flower. When I was reading about this the average wage for the people who do this was something like 5 cents an hour.
50% of the worlds legal opium poppies (the ones used to make opioid drugs by big pharma ) are grown in Tasmania , Australia.
If you want a more in depth answer then Michael Pollan’s “This is your mind on plants” talks about the complexity of poppy growing history.
Essentially, it’s because taking opium is illegal in many other places.
There’s a 464 page book called The Politics of Heroin that will take you up through the Vietnam War and a link on the Wikipedia page that will further take you to Afghanistan
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia
The ELI5 TLDR is that Opium and it’s forms finance and fuel war.
The morphine helps the soldiers, the profits pay for the war. The addicts are the customers. The traffickers deal in both Opium and Arms.
The book itself has a fascinating history surrounding its publication and exposé of drug trafficking.
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