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veggie

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,538
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The opium field of England...
#8551449 - 06/22/08 05:32 PM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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Destroy crops overseas and grow them at home ...
The opium field of England... heroin-producing poppies grown to make NHS pain-relief drugs June 22, 2008 - dailymail.co.uk
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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Visionary Tools



Registered: 06/23/07
Posts: 7,953
Last seen: 1 year, 11 months
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: veggie]
#8551787 - 06/22/08 07:22 PM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
.
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.’
One day it's medicine. Some other day it's EVIL DRUGS DESTROYING OUR NATION SOMEONE PLZ THINK OF THE CHILDS!
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JT



Registered: 02/28/07
Posts: 7,027
Loc: athens
Last seen: 4 years, 10 months
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: veggie]
#8552045 - 06/22/08 08:35 PM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
veggie said:
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.

anyone else remember the "how to make heroin" movie where it documented the guys in afghanistan using only a washing machine and some basic chems to go from pod to dope?
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entheomandotcom
Stranger

Registered: 03/28/08
Posts: 282
Last seen: 15 years, 4 months
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: JT]
#8552133 - 06/22/08 09:01 PM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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I would just make tea,,,
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Le_Canard
The Duk Abides


Registered: 05/16/03
Posts: 94,392
Loc: Earthfarm 1
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: veggie]
#8552147 - 06/22/08 09:06 PM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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Good thing it isn't acres of mind-destroying skunk marijuana.
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DragonChaser
Ice in Her Ass and Pussy



Registered: 04/27/06
Posts: 7,212
Last seen: 6 years, 6 months
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: veggie]
#8552438 - 06/22/08 10:40 PM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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I would be raiding their fields at night with some friends of mine who are no longer in the special forces. Opium, FTW.
-------------------- My name is Mud
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Ego Death
Justadropofwaterinanendlesssea



Registered: 04/27/03
Posts: 10,447
Loc: The War Machine
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: DragonChaser]
#8553351 - 06/23/08 06:40 AM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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I expect most the people from the UK live near one of these fields. UKs a small country and theres a few dotted over the country.
Dunno if they are raidable though but that would be funny.
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Visionary Tools



Registered: 06/23/07
Posts: 7,953
Last seen: 1 year, 11 months
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: Ego Death]
#8553697 - 06/23/08 09:28 AM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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Yeah. There's opium in Oxfordshire. I've walked through them with a joint on the go, chopping them up with my machete.
It's funny because that's gonna piss off a lot of people, and I like opium.
But it's fucking fuckup opiates. Damnit, if we're growing fucking SMACK then how about some herb to help with the withdrawals, and something for the artheritis and cancer and asthma and chemo patients.
Hah, yeah. I'm waiting for that miracle in my own way. The rest of the world can go fuck itself in a collective materialist circlewank.
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Ego Death
Justadropofwaterinanendlesssea



Registered: 04/27/03
Posts: 10,447
Loc: The War Machine
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Dang, I would of been scatchin those pods 
I've always wanted to try opium but all thats here is heroin. Never had and never would smoke that.
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jeetered
Stranger



Registered: 07/07/06
Posts: 3,055
Loc: no clue
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: Ego Death]
#8555088 - 06/23/08 04:50 PM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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why don't they just score the pods and collect the raw opium to derive their meds from? Seems there would be a much greater yield to me.
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Ego Death
Justadropofwaterinanendlesssea



Registered: 04/27/03
Posts: 10,447
Loc: The War Machine
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Re: The opium field of England... [Re: jeetered]
#8555134 - 06/23/08 05:00 PM (15 years, 10 months ago) |
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There would be less of a yield because there are many actives in the pod still after the opium has been removed. Its also more efficient to separate the actives chemically than to pay workers to score pods and then still have to separate them.
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