Problems 451in the box Determinants of Cooperation.” T.docx
Williams 2010 EPD
1. Introduction
Islands are the embodiment of isolation and by definition insular. However, they are
also complex and contradictory phenomena. Islands are made ever more accessible
with new transport and communications technologies, for example, but are still dis-
articulated and rendered distantöif only in the geographical imaginationöfrom other
islands, mainlands, and continental counterparts (Baldacchino, 2005; 2008; Clark,
2004; Hay, 2006; Royle, 2001; 2007). The paradoxical nature of islands and insularity
invites the inquiry pursued here in a study of Australia's role as a major producer and
exporter of licit narcotics with its cultivation of opium poppies confined to the island
state of Tasmania. This case is of interest as isolation is deemed critical in the
industry's success and yet it necessarily has linkages extending far beyond state and
nation. For Clark (2004) islands can reveal much about globalisation, and he thus
recommends studying ``island biocultural geographies'' of which he notes: ``They will
require historical depth. They must also be sensitive to scale, to the ambiguities of
globalisation in connection with boundaries, and to the ambiguities of boundaries
in connection with change in diversity'' (page 292). The poppy industry in Tasmania
is therefore examined here as both isolated and connected with an exploration of its
historical and cultural limits as well as juridical and territorial boundaries.
Tasmania is located 250 km southeast off Australia's mainland and five other states
and two territories. Establishing an alkaloids industry on this island in the 1960s required
major new infrastructure and the introduction of opium poppies. It is not well known but
since then Tasmania has often provided up to half of the world's supply of licit narcotics
each year, with the poppy industry being developed there as a significant part of the state
economy (DPIW, 2006; see also table 1). But international competition is fierce. While
relevant information is limited, the official statistics indicate that of all licit producer
nations Australia often manufactured the most morphine equivalent in the years up to
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret
pharmacy
Stewart Williams
School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 78,
Hobart, TAS 7001, Australia; e-mail: Stewart.Williams@utas.edu.au
Received 14 May 2008; in revised form 6 August 2009; published online 1 March 2010
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 290 ^ 310
Abstract. Islands embody a contradictory geography. Although insularity has negative connotations,
the related aspects of uniqueness, smallness, secrecy, security, isolation, and remoteness all have
strategic roles in situating Australia's production of licit narcotics as an international success with
poppy cultivation confined to the island state of Tasmania. Through the boundaries and dualisms
inscribed in the discourses of islandness and drug rhetoric, the state's ultramodern manufacture of
pharmaceuticals is contrasted with others elsewhere, including opium and illegal drug production.
Their representations simplify the more intricate and challenging geopolitical realities that link this
industry to transnational corporations, state and federal governments, their agencies, and various UN
organisations. In a poststructural reading, the secrets of islands and drugs are suggested to comprise
what Derrida terms aporia or impossible situations: Tasmania and its poppy industry are isolated from
a global otherness yet entwine different peoples and places in connecting complex material practices
both licit and illicit at multiple scales all around the world. However, these aporia also present new
political and ethical openings with significance for island studies as well as for narcotics production
and its regulation.
doi:10.1068/d5608
2. and including 2005 but, with recent changes, has subsequently failed to maintain this
particular top position (INCB, 2007; 2008; see also table 2). The largest fall in this output
from Australia was in 2006, for example, when it manufactured only 70 tonnes of
morphine equivalent compared with Turkey's 106 tonnes (but together leading with 22%
and 34%, respectively, of world production). However, detail is important here as narcotic
materials vary in type and strength. India is responsible for most of the world's raw opium
made under licence, which included 97% of all such output in 2006 but comprised only 38
tonnes of morphine equivalent or 12% of that year's global production of licit narcotics
(with low yields of active ingredients). Also, Australia now cultivates another poppy crop
(for the alkaloid thebaine not morphine) and so manufactures an additional annual
output, which in 2006 was over 57 tonnes of thebaine equivalent or 80% of global thebaine
production (INCB, 2007, pages 77 ^ 81).
Australia's poppy industry is an international success, with significant levels
of output and technological innovation, yet it is shrouded in mystery. This tendency
for the industry to be covert arises because its commodities are ``not ordinary
merchandise'' (Wood, 1988, page 149). Being confined to an island location (Tasmania)
therefore serves to protect it from illicit activity and to distance it from competitors,
but can also provide security where the pursuit of cutting-edge science might demand
secrecy. However, despite the sophisticated production there of pharmaceutical-grade
Table 1. The Tasmanian poppy industry: trends 1996 ^ 2006 (source: Department of Justice, 2005;
2006; DPIW, 2006; PACB, 2006).
Harvest year
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Number of growers 810 970 1 050 1 140 1 450 1 380 1 250 1 150 980 910 789
licensed
Number of hectares 8 500 9 600 11 500 13 500 20 600 19 300 19 600 17 500 12 200 12 900 9 660
harvested
Farmgate valuea 22 20 30 35 51 41 74 68 40 47 25
(Aus $million)
Number of capsules 68 724 42 426 30 424 66 013 62 700 7 765 15 946 20 223 24 128 16 201 10 263
stolen
Number of thefts 46 38 34 39 20 27 27 37 35 13
reported
a Farmgate value is not to be confused with total values (reaching Aus $200 million in 2000 ± 03).
Table 2. World production of licit narcotics: tonnes morphine equivalent 2003 ^ 08 (source: INCB,
2007; 2008).
Harvest year
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008a
Australia 151 96 130 70 68 53
France 68 101 96 56 25 49
Hungary 9 30 15 17 15 49
India 57 92 37 38 30 24
Spain 44 55 36 17 70 85
Turkey 145 60 64 106 30 70
Others 13 13 13 12 14 22
Total 487 447 391 316 252 352
a 2008 data are estimates.
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 291
3. narcotics (rather than raw opium), identification of the crop as `oil' and `oilseed' poppy
or simply as poppies (with no adjective) denies they are even the same opium poppies.
The inscription (or not) of this detail works with the state's representation as insular to
disassociate its industry from others elsewhere, including illegal drug producers found,
for example, in the Golden Crescent and Golden Triangle.(1) The obfuscation is intended:
``It is difficult to specify the monetary significance of the crop to growers as the whole
industry has been handled with an air of secrecy; for example, even the official
agricultural census publications refer to `oil poppies' when the main purpose of
production is pharmaceutical'' (Wood, 1987, page 164).
Deconstruction is a useful tool for interpreting such discursive silences and duplicity,
and it has a specific relevance in this context. In the interview titled ``The rhetoric
of drugs'' Derrida traces the slippages between cure and toxin, and the licit and illicit,
in discourses that have long structured ``the institutional character of a certain concept of
drugs, drug addiction, narcotics and poisons'' (1993a, page 2). The insights drawn from
this and other of his texts help to situate what is said alongside that which often remains
unsaidöand of islands as well as drugsöin representing Tasmania's poppy industry.
This study first notes the relationships articulating islands as insular. Some of the
key types of poppies and narcotics are then identified in licit and illicit forms, culti-
vation and production. Tasmania's poppy industry is considered next in location on
Australia's only island state and represented as isolated and hence secure. Such claims
made of this and other islands are therefore problematised as overly simple, dualistic
representations. They are then reconnected with the more complex geopolitical realities
of this Tasmanian case. In conclusion, the findings and their poststructural inflections
are used to comment both on the sociospatial relations of narcotics production and its
regulation and on island studies.
On islands and insularity
An island's physical geography can offer individual solitude and uniqueness but isolation
and parochialism also loom as size and distance influence remoteness, peripherality, and
dependence on somewhere else. The outside world remains important as islands are
often bridged or provide points of connection, but their depictions therefore embrace
binary structures with marked spatial contradictions:
``An island is a nervous duality: it confronts us as a juxtaposition and confluence of
the understanding of local and global realities, of interior and exterior references
of meaning, of having roots at home while also deploying routes away from home''
(Baldacchino, 2005, page 248).
The attendant ambiguities are many and further exacerbated with the shifting nature of
islands. Their simultaneous isolation and connection are brought home with global-
isation drawing attention to small island states (Biagini and Hoyle, 1999; Briguglio,
1995). As the limitations existing in and through place for insular societies and economies
thus intensified (against the global city's rise), globalisation has also accentuated the
benefits of an island location (Baldacchino, 2000; King and Connell, 1999; Royle, 2001).(2)
(1) The Golden Crescent comprises an arc of mountainous terrain extending across Iran, Afghanistan,
and Pakistan. The Golden Triangle straddles the borders of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma).
(2) The problems hounding small island states were described, following work on the Pacific's
political economy in the 1980s by Bertram and others, with the MIRAB model. The acronym
refers to the migration outwards of residents who send remittances home and to the aid flowing
inwards which sustains employment in the local bureaucracy. Some MIRAB economies have since
been augmented variously with international tourism as an economic engine or strong local
jurisdictions that exercise resource and financial management schemes as offshore tax-havens
(Bertram, 2006).
292 S Williams
4. Consider, for example, the reinvention of some Pacific island nations' economies
(Bertram, 2006) or the pursuit of jurisdictional autonomy and political economic
success by nonsovereign island states elsewhere (Baldacchino, 2006a; 2006b; 2006c).
Isolation is also problematic as it impacts on islands and landlocked territories
alike in imposing high transport and communications costs (Armstrong and Read,
2000; 2003; Baldacchino and Milne, 2000). Of course, small and island states can
still grow through ``openness to trade, a high propensity for human capital formation
and, in some cases, an advantageous location'' and despite vulnerabilities that are
``economic, strategic and environmental'' (Armstrong and Read, 2003, page 107). There-
fore, islandness does not necessarily impede economic performance. Alternatively,
Armstrong and Read (2006) associate it with better-than-average gross national incomes
per capita, and they find its worst aspectöremoteness from global marketsörather
more characteristic of dispersed archipelagos and mountainous territories than of islands
per se.
As an island, Tasmania is just as contrary. Although affluent and better placed as
a subnational jurisdiction than many islands with sovereignty, its socioeconomic status
is diminished relative to the nation. In particular, Tasmania's small size (with fewer
than half a million people on 68 000 km2 of land) and its location (over Bass Strait)
distance it from the mainland's wealth and power (Stratford, 2003; 2006a; 2006b). Its
islandness is now used, however, to market clean, green produce (Gralton and Vanclay,
2006; Stratford, 2006b) and a unique natural heritage (Stratford, 2003). Remoteness is
not problematic for the state's poppy industry, as the product loses bulk in processing
and has a very high end-value, whereas isolation is valued.
Beyond any commonality, islands are the embodiment of singularity and difference
and most valued as particularly special or unique places (Baldacchino, 2005; 2008;
Hay, 2006). As their novelty and variety rather than similarity gather interest, however,
those more generic attributes of smallness, isolation, and remoteness seem increasingly
weak or diffuse and especially when they pertain more to nonisland than to island
states. Island scholars too circumscribe their subject matter (in general, as island studies)
only loosely with sociospatial and scalar relations to incorporate worlds of difference
in ranging from vulnerability to resourcefulness, isolation to connection (Baldacchino,
2005; 2007; 2008; Clark, 2004; Royle, 2001; 2007). Meanwhile insularity has retained
its mostly negative connotations of closure and constraint and so is shunned in the
island studies discourse. For example, Baldacchino heralds notions of islandness
over an insularity that intones only the ``deep-rooted and stultifying ... consequences
of islandness'' and ``conservative nature of small societies'' (2008, page 49) and Royle
states: ``Islands need not be `insular' in the sense that word has of being inward looking,
removed from new ideas or different cultures'' (2007, page B-2-1). Yet insularity broadly
understood is the same complex and persistent phenomenon undergirding and thus
synonymous with islandness.
In describing the nature of islands, the analysis here does not necessarily distin-
guish between the two terms `insularity' and `islandness'. Instead, it looks at depictions
of islands and their differences through an inscription of borders which remains
problematic in all cases because, as island scholars such as Steinberg note, ``neither
the boundaries between land and sea nor those between state and state represent
`natural' social orderings'' (2005, page 264; see also Steinberg, 2007). It is also oppor-
tune to refocus on the border's critical role in this emerging discipline, especially
at a time when, as another noted island scholar comments, ``hard-edgedness and a
consequent insularity are no longer much in favour within island studies'' (Hay, 2006,
page 22).
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 293
5. On poppies and narcotics
An ambiguity in representation resonates with the similarly complicated boundaries
and paradoxes that insinuate our understanding of narcotics and their particular
properties. In fact, differentiation is critical here too as very few out of the hundreds
of poppy species can produce narcotic effects. Only the opium poppy (Papaver somni-
ferum L.) synthesises morphine, which it produces along with more than forty other
opiate alkaloids including codeine, noscapine, oviparine, papaverine, and thebaine. These
bitter, alkaline organic compounds accumulate in the poppy's sap as the main component
of raw opium.(3) Their capacity to induce sleepiness, slow vital functions, and relieve
severe pain, makes them essential to modern medicine. Poppies have been cultivated
in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor for millennia, however, and for the oil extracted
from their seeds as much as for opium (in addition to using the seeds for culinary
purposes, and the straw as fodder and fuel). Many Papaveracae species have ornamental
value, too, but the opium variety is the best known and valued for its narcotic namesake.
The contested meanings of narcotics are constructed in discursive practices described
by Derrida as ``the rhetoric of drugs'' and in which he notes the ``opposition of nature and
institution'' (1993a, page 3). In the 19th century, when this drug rhetoric was being
consolidated within the modern medicojuridical episteme, opiate usage was extensive.
Laudanum and other preparations were readily given to children and adults for ailments
often as basic as a cough or cold. Practices such as opium smoking, on the other hand,
were associated with society's lower orders, the working classes, women, and the Orient,
and they were demonised and criminalised whilst pharmacological developments bounded
ahead. Ironically, the identification of morphine in 1805, the invention of the hypodermic
syringe mid-century, and the manufacture of diacetylmorphine at the century's end, all
resulted from efforts made (partly, at least) to alleviate the already patent problems of drug
(3) The only other poppy that produces any latex that might be called opium (rich in thebaine rather
than morphine) is Papaver bracteatum.
Figure 1. 19th-century trade card of Perry Davis's Pain Killer (patented 1845).
294 S Williams
7. Both medical wonder and dangerous intoxicant, opium epitomises the pharmakon
as discussed by Derrida (1981; 1993a). In his deconstructive readings, this undecidable
term has meanings that include drug, healing remedy, enchanted potion, charm or spell,
and poison, and it indicates diffe¨ rance and dissemination in disrupting any original
presence with its constant deferral of meaning. Opium and its narcotic derivatives like-
wise have their own contradistinctions and interminable tracings institutionalised in
various forms. For example, almost every country supports the United Nations (UN)
in its international regulation of narcotics with legitimate uses but each in concert with its
own policing of illegal drugs at home. In the case of the UN the International Narcotics
Control Board (INCB) endeavours to stabilise the global narcotics scene and aspects of
production, in particular, through licensing poppy growers. Furnished with the estimates
from most nations of their yearly drug requirements, and balancing all imports and
exports against stockpiles, the INCB determines the total number and allocation of
all poppy licences. It thereby aims to ensure that the world's production of narcotics
is adequate to its needs whilst reducing both diversion from licit crops and what is
determined illegal cultivation which together supply the world with drugs such as heroin
(INCB, 2007; 2008).(4)
A binary logic structures poppy cultivation and processing. In Derridean parlance,
the industry's other or `dangerous supplement' of illegality not only frames the licit
scene but inevitably enters it. Afghanistan is thus crucial here. Notably, since opium
production resumed in the 1990s after briefly being outlawed under the Taliban, this
nation's narcotics production has exceeded that of any other (licit or illicit), and broke
all-time records in 2006 and 2007 to supply unprecedented amounts of heroin to the
world such that radical change is now sought (Chouvy, 2008). Therefore, one key
proposal (Spivack, 2005) recommends the regulation of Afghan production with licens-
ing and a shift from traditional opium to the more modern processing of dry poppy
straw off-site. The use of mechanical harvesters and industrial factories to manufacture
alkaloids as concentrate of poppy straw (CPS) is more efficient but deemed safer too,
both in minimising possible diversion mostly because of its reduced labour require-
ments and in requiring machinery otherwise unavailable to illicit operators. Turkey, for
example, had traditionally produced opium (and, later, also CPS) until international
pressures over diversion obliged it to prohibit all production in 1971. When the ban was
lifted in 1974, poppy cultivation recommenced under UN licence but only because
Turkey, with changes in government and improved international relations, agreed to
confine its industry to processing poppy straw in return for American subsidies and
British technical assistance (Jensema and Archer, 2005; Wood, 1988). Opium is still
produced legally in China, the Democratic Republic of Korea, and Japan as well as in
India but India is the world's largest producer and sole licit exporter, and therefore
under pressure to change practice as opium is seen as so problematic (INCB, 2007;
Mansfield, 2001).
Despite the UN's efforts (and several wars on drugs), its logos and nomos as
universal reason and power have not resolved the drug issues that continue to present
in various forms. There are no easy answers to sorting out their differences or for
circumventing the problems that might arise because the pharmakon is the ambivalent
medium of an elemental mixing and thus prior to any differentiation whatsoever in its
oppositions and effects: ``This pharmaceutical nonsubstance cannot be handled with
(4) Heroin can be produced from opium by adding and heating chemicals with basic equipment
under the simplest conditions. It is also manufactured to pharmaceutical grade and used in medical
procedures in hospitals or prescribed to patients in, for example, Australia and the UK which thus
provide other (but far less significant) points for diversion into illicit use beyond the poppy industry
itself.
296 S Williams
8. complete security, neither in its being, since it has none, nor in its effects, the sense
of which is always capable of changing'' (Derrida, 1981, page 126). For example, the
traditional production of opium and the modern manufacture of pharmaceuticals have
been brought together in an international licensing system but with their contradictions
simply rewritten in law. Their differences are reformulated just as problematically in other
representations. The mapping of Tasmania in one particular geography of global narcotics
production thus cleaves ``developed and developing countries'' to overlook complexities
otherwise only intimated in part as ``Western farming systems might adversely affect the
livelihoods of millions of Third World inhabitants'' (Wood, 1988, pages 149, 151). These
relationships are rarely so simple. Singled out as ``the best in the world'' (DPIW, 2006;
Fist, 2001; Jensema and Archer, 2005), the poppy industry in Tasmania is far from
alone. It is just one of many producers each trying to secure efficiencies and profits
amid intense competition. For these same reasons, islandness has always been drawn
upon in its differentiation.
Isolating Tasmania, securing the industry
Tasmania's Department of Justice is responsible for securing the state's poppy crop.
This duty is performed with its Poppy Advisory and Control Board (PACB) and the
Tasmania Police Poppy Task Force which swells to approximately forty officers (most
seconded over the summer) to investigate suspected illegalities such as the disturbance
of poppy fields. All narcotic substances in Tasmania, and the licensing of poppy
growers, are controlled under the state's Poisons Act, 1971 (Tas.). Support is available
from the federal government, which can under Commonwealth legislation deploy
any of the Australian Federal Police, Australian Customs Services, Australian Protective
Services, and Australian Quarantine Inspection Services. However, responsibility devolves
to local or state level because:
``to provide a secure and controlled poppy industry in accordance with United
Nations Conventions... is in effect a shared responsibility with contributions being
made by the Board [PACB], by Tasmania Police and by the growers and processors
themselves'' (Department of Justice, 2005, page 56).
Islandness interpenetrates the discourse. The PACB (2005) claims ``a dual security'' for
the industry in processing poppy straw and being ``ideally positioned geographically
and demographically... [with] small, regional populations... [in a] compact state that is
separated from the Australian continent.'' Furthermore, drug offences are ``relatively
low'' (PACB, 2005).
Illegal drug use in Tasmania does cohere, however, as a recognisable entity. A
major national survey (running uniformly across all states and territories since 2000)
notes: ``Tasmanian illicit drug use culture has been consistently shown to substantially
differ from other jurisdictions... [in its use of ] pharmaceutical products rather than
substances such as heroin, due to low local availability of this drug'' (Bruno, 2006,
page xvi). The illicit consumption of prescription narcotics is not readily divulged and
is only now coming to light. But nor is it well known that Tasmanians can access raw
narcotics unavailable on the mainland, and crude and illegal decoctions referred
to locally as poppy tea and tar (a reduction of the former) are produced from the
tens of thousands of capsules stolen each year from the poppy fields (Bruno, 2006;
Department of Justice, 2005; 2006; see also table 1). Thefts of this sort demand the
policing of the poppy crops each summer at costs to the state of over Aus $500 000
(Department of Justice, 2005; 2006). Yet claims to security persist and in which
``Tasmania's island status and the existence of a law-abiding and (relatively) drug-free
population are of vital importance'' (PACB, 2006, page 4).
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 297
9. In addition to downplaying illicit activity, the state industry tends to efface itself
but it comes under erasure also from without. The former French NGO and global
drug-monitoring organisation Observatoire Ge¨ opolitique des Drogues, for example,
in a report on the world situation (OGD, 2000), describes the issues affecting
each continent but does not even mention Australia or Oceania let alone Tasmania!
However, the modern West's symbolic order of Law has long encircled this landscape
in legislating its limits and identifying the deviant Other(s). For example, the state's
geography as an island and its early white history as a penal colony (in the first half
of the 19th century when it was known as Van Diemens Land) are both afforded
``primary importance'' by Morris (1995, page 115) in her explanation of how it had
been Australia's last bastion in still outlawing the `unnatural' act of homosexuality.
The unquestioned appropriation of this land from its original owners, and the supposed
subsequent (and even inevitable) extinction of its indigenous peoples were then also
being written into the annals of the state's colonial history. More recently, Tasmania
was the last of all the Australian states (along with the Northern Territory) to acknowl-
edge the extent of illicit opiate use in its jurisdiction with an official drug treatment
programme licensed to dispense methadone or buprenorphine. All these issues (and the
rights of gays, indigenes, and drug users) started to be addressed through legislative
and other developments only in the 1990s. The resistance here to any change has been
marked. It also signals how such problems can be accentuated on islands but remain
focused on identity, being, and belonging as they relate to the proper, proper names,
property, and propriety (and impropriety) with a presence or absence represented in
law.
The Tasmanian poppy industry's corporate partners likewise maintain a particular
vision of the state, similarly presented, and for their own reasons:
``Located between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 42 degrees south of the Equator,
the island of Tasmania is the southern-most state of Australia. Winds known as the
Roaring Forties ply the west coast of the island. Originating in the Atlantic Ocean
and blowing unhindered over the breadth of the Indian Ocean, these winds bring
with them the world's cleanest air and purest rains. In this pristine environment
some of the world's oldest living flora and fauna are found. Over 30 percent of
Tasmania is protected as national parks, forest reserves and with World Heritage
classification. Thanks to the natural advantages afforded by this untouched
environment, quality products from our island easily find a home in the world's
most selective markets. The rich, fertile soils; a maritime, temperate climate; and
the availability of irrigation to supplement natural rainfall, make Tasmania the best
place in the world for growing poppies'' (Tasmanian Alkaloids, 2004a).
An oceanic outpost and secluded haven, Tasmania is rendered remote in time and
space. Any activity in the landscape other than activity to do with the poppy industry
relates to a natural environment and its conservation. This romantic portrayal rever-
berates at several levels in linking ``our island'' with ``a home in the world'' but a spatial
and temporal enclosure of the state is then ruled with its en-crypt-ion using laws
of environmental protection as well as narcotics regulation.
Insularity was always a key factor in Tasmania's selection for poppy cultivation.
It still figures in the industry's reported success as secrecy, safety, and security have
been critical for the crop ever since its sensitive nature first entwined other materialities:
``Considerable secrecy surrounds the production of poppies in Tasmania ... . Most
probably for security reasons, several mainland states were unwilling to licence
production and Tasmania was selected as the location for more intensive trials.
Factors influencing the selection of Tasmania included the coincidence of suit-
able climate, soil and type of farming practice, the isolation of the state and
298 S Williams
10. the willingness of the state government to sanction production'' (Wood, 1978,
pages 213 ^ 214).
Any threats seem inherently foreign in impinging from outside. The decision to estab-
lish this industry was made after narcotics supplies had been disrupted in World
War II, and so the agriculturalist working with the company which developed it
comments: ``The fact that the industry finally was established on an island greatly
enhances its security'' (King, 1999). The chief agronomist with the other main company
similarly states: ``The isolation of Tasmania is also an advantage for narcotic security.
Tasmania has an excellent record in security and is the benchmark for other producing
nations'' (Fist, 2001), and its field operations manager notes: ``Tasmania is the bench-
mark for security, only 0.001% crop theft compared to 25% in India'' (Rockliff, 1999).(5)
With claims to safety, security, secrecy, and success, the state has provided the
ballast for an international flagship industry. Commentators outside Australia see
the industry as ``confined to the island state of Tasmania, which significantly limits
possibilities for diversion'' but they remark too on its exceptional CPS-morphine
yields of 1.61% compared with 1.15% and 0.33% for export rivals France and Turkey,
respectively, in 2001 ^ 03 (Jensema and Archer, 2005, page 153). Using the best science
and technology has paid off, but the advantages were even more marked in 1994 ^ 98
when ``Australia's yield per hectare [was] eight times that of Turkey, nearly twice that of
Spain and 30% higher than France'' (Fist, 2001). Differences are declining, as these data
indicate, but especially as international competitors catch up on industrial knowledge
and practices (Jensema and Archer, 2005). Amid such change, it is worth remembering
that Australia was once just the adopter of others' innovations, as Wood (1978) noted
when he first mapped poppy cultivation's introduction and diffusion across the state of
Tasmania.
The impossible secrets of the island (and its others)
Islands are necessarily open as well as closed. Flows breach their boundaries and the
movement inward and outward of new ideas and practices as well as goods belies any
rigid isolation and security. But, even as islands change, and despite their dynamic and
relational rather than fixed nature, bounded notions of insularity persist. In becoming
places of innovation over backwardness or an origin rather than a destination, islands
are ascribed new meanings, but they are still marked and remarked with strict boun-
dary definitions in relation to something and/or somewhere else. Islands therefore
represent places of alterity for, as well as being entities identical to a concept with
boundaries that suggest the closure of self-sameness, they are open to infinite differ-
ence in their constant reiteration and dis-closure. In the movement of approaching
and exceeding their limits, islands are often in a state of becoming other-wise in the
extreme.
(5) Diversion of licit poppy crops is inevitable with subsistence farming where black market prices
far exceed those paid by governments. Rates of diversion are difficult to assess but estimates for
India reach as high as 30% (Booth, 1996). India's illicit cultivation is less often mentioned and yet
is probably greater than its licit cultivation. For example, in 2008 the Indian Central Bureau of
Narcotics reported that 7753 ha of illegal poppy crops were eradicated in the previous year when
only 6300 ha were licensed (Chouvy, 2008). Illegal processing and transiting of drugs are a problem
in Turkey, but mostly outside licensed production, so not diversion per se which is minimal
(Mansfield, 2001). The claim by the head of the Turkish alkaloids factory in Bolvadin that
smugglers pay up to 1000 times licit market prices for morphine base (OGD, 2000; also cited
in Jensema and Archer, 2005) is perhaps evidence less of diversion than of Turkish concern over
(and an effort to discourage) the licensing of yet more new producer nations such as Australia
which lowers the price of licit narcotics.
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 299
11. In this study's context, insular locales also provide covert transit points in the
global traffic of illegal drugs and the Caribbean islands, for example, have become
infamous in confounding US drug enforcement efforts. A report summary to the
British government (Mansfield, 2001), advising India to use the poppy straw process
for reasons of security and efficiency, warns about islands: ``Of particular importance,
the report recommends that a freight profiling exercise on shipments from, or transit-
ing, Sri Lanka should be conducted to assess the potential threat trafficking via this
country poses to the UK'' (Mansfield, 2001, page iii). The INCB similarly reports,
closer to home but outside Australia: ``The island States in Oceania, because of
their geographical remoteness, porous maritime borders and relatively weak control
measures are extremely vulnerable to exploitation by drug traffickers'' (2008, page 103).
Such islands tend to be poorly resourced and governed and some are not even
party to international drug control treaties [see footnote (8)]. They are thus the anti-
thesis of Tasmania as represented here, and so join those most distant, alien, inefficient,
and/or illicit others comprising the constitutive outside of this particular island
state and industry leader. But they are not really outside this case, appearing here
as a result of having been identified in reports still concerned primarily with licit
narcotics. Likewise, rather than try to settle (so far apart) on the absolute differences
of a conflicting, contrary identification that persists in opposing interior and exterior,
it is worthwhile returning to the more fluid relations of diffe¨ rance and the pharmakon,
for example, and an otherness that Derrida describes as ``parasitism ... at once acci-
dental and essential ... at once inside and outsideöthe outside feeding on the inside''
(1993a, page 6). It harks back to his critiques of the interval, gap, and trace, but also
of the text, body, and institution disrupted as proper or coinciding with itself. Their
deconstructive X/not-X problematisations exceed any ``this and/or that'' and refuse
the dialectical ``third term'' of the Aufhebung as sublation so as to resist closure.
Instead, the Derridean play of diffe¨ rance mobilises the fundamental irreducibility and
undecidability of phenomena that otherwise appear as stable entities.
With ``the becoming-space of time and becoming-time of space'', speech and writ-
ing, life and death, are all explored in Derrida's productive unsettling of key concepts
such as the gift, hospitality, friendship, forgiveness, democracy or sovereignty. But
islands hardly feature in his work (unlike drugs which often appear as the pharmakon).
Light is shed on them, however, as their contradictory nature embodies a problematic
but familiar spatiality and temporality. In fact, the difficult aspects of islands or
islandness are consonant with those impasses Derrida describes as ``impossible'' in
Aporias (1993b). More specifically, in a much later discussion of religion situated
in terms of faith and reason, Derrida refers to ``the island, the Promised Land, the
desert'' all as ``aporetical places: with no way out or an assured path, without itinerary
or point of arrival, without an exterior with a predictable map and a calculable
programme'' (2002, page 47). The description of such phenomena as aporetic or
impossible does not suggest that they are contrary to the possible so much as they
are the affirmation of an impossible and yet necessary movement in running up against
the border. So, for example, our existence in life is a ``being-towards-death'' as Dasein
stands before itself in death (after Heidegger) but, with being and non-being both
intimately proximate and yet absolutely distant from each other, it poses an ``impos-
sible simultaneity... at which we await each other... at the same time'' (Derrida, 1993b,
page 65). Likewise, we stand as subjects ``before the Law'' (after Kafka) but none enter
its domain which is ``neither natural nor institutional; one can never reach it, and it
never reaches the depths of its original and proper taking-place ... . It is always cryptic;
that is, it is a secret'' (Derrida, 1992, page 205). There is no escaping the impasse of an
300 S Williams
12. aporos (usually given in the plural as aporia) as its engagement is also what enables the
possibilities of life and re-creation anew.
The aporetic relation and its impossibility reveal the awkward spacing of the
event which already is, and yet is not (not fully realised, for example), exemplified
in notions of a democracy ``to come'' that proliferate throughout Derrida's work.
Such anachronie and espacement also ground the representation of islands in their
most proper possibility yet impossibility as insular, both isolated and connected,
and as novel but also timeless and unchanging in their encounter with the limit.
This disjointed spatiotemporal structuring is mentioned in relation to the denials
and affirmations of a deconstruction that Derrida also likens to negative theology
with his references to ``a secret of denial and a denial of the secret ... [such that] this
de-negation gives no chance to dialect'' (1996, page 25). In conversations published
as A Taste for the Secret, he suggests ``the locus of the secret... the place of this
unconditional and absolute secret'' might exist in death (and perhaps even God) but
he then also looks to ``that which is carried off by deathöthat which is thus life itself'',
and likewise in considering law and human rights and the interminable pursuit of
justice, he concludes that there is no hope of any consensus or transcendence and
in turn only proffers our own familiar world of difference and dissent where ``we never
finish with this secret, we are never finished, there is no end'' (Derrida and Ferraris,
2001, pages 57 ^ 58; see also Derrida, 1995). Derrida's insights hold for any of those
entities which, since named through an inscription of borders affixing clearly marked
identities with supposedly enduring properties, can be problematised in deconstruction
as a trace, supplement, or pharmakon but also as an aporos. But they are especially
relevant to this case, based as it is in an explicit secrecy and denial, with claims to
closure through the rulings of legality and insularity which pose their finitude and
naturalness in unity contra a totally other otherness. For just as the nature of islands
refuses to be bound by any final representation, so too their secrets are forever escaping,
as impossible:
``The secret... is a negation that denies itself. It de-negates itself. This denegation
does not happen to it by accident; it is essential and originary ... . The enigma ... is
the sharing of the secret. Not only the sharing of the secret with the other... I refer
first of all to the secret shared within itself, its partition `proper,' which divides the
essence of a secret that cannot even appear to one alone except in starting to
be lost, to divulge itself, hence to dissimulate itself, as secret, in showing itself:
dissimulating its dissimulation. There is no secret as such; I deny it'' (Derrida, 1996,
pages 25 ^ 26).
Indeed, the almost absurd impossibility of this case of Australia's secret pharmacy was
revealed recently. In June 2009 comments made by Tasmania's attorney general report-
ing to a parliamentary hearing on the security of the state's poppy crops became the
basis for an unanticipated worldwide news phenomenon. The state's otherwise relatively
clandestine industry received international publicity when stories about the attorney
general's report of intoxicated wallabies walking around Tasmanian poppy fields appeared
in news outlets as far afield as the New York Daily Times (Sheridan and Nagraj, 2009)
and the BBC News (2009).
From insularity to geopolitics
The real mystery of Australia's secret pharmacy is not what might with a little work
(as done here) be revealed of the cultivation and processing of poppies in Tasmania.
In fact, its more covert aspects rank amongst what Derrida calls ``conditional secrets
(the secret of confession, the professional secret, the military secret, the manufacturing
secret, the state secret)'' and he then dismisses ``[b]ecause the secret can be shared there,
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 301
13. and ... becomes simply a problem'' (1995, page 25). Rather, the enigma resides in
claims to closure and self-presence with an identity (in this case as wholly insular
and legal) that opens onto and then entwines a problematic otherness. In working
away at the border it becomes apparent that Tasmania and its poppy industry
have always already enfolded a multiscalar politics and global complexity. To start,
narcotics production in Tasmania has equalled Australia's total output ever since
agreements made in 1971 between each of the states and territories restricted the
industry there, as ``the isolation of the island state... gave added security against
any illegal use of poppy crops'' (Laughlin et al, 1998, page 251). Strong relations
amongst the federal and state governments and agencies including the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, police and quarantine services, and
agricultural departments then shaped its development (DPIW, 2006; Laughlin et al,
1998). Furthermore, whilst the industry relies on UN licensing, its corporate history,
trade agreements, and R&D efforts also have international significance, variously
pertaining across the world.
The Australian industry began overseas with Edinburgh company Macfarlan Smith
seeking somewhere new to cultivate poppies. It had identified several potential sites
in Australia and in New Zealand when, after being taken over by the British conglom-
erate Glaxo Group in 1964, it commenced trials in Tasmania. With company successes
there and elsewhere, Glaxo then merged to form GlaxoWellcome in 1994, which
subsequently joined SmithKlineBeecham in 2000 to create GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
as the world's largest pharmaceuticals company.(6) The other longstanding operator is
Tasmanian Alkaloids P/L. It completes all processing in Tasmania unlike GSK, which
finishes some manufacture in the southeastern mainland state of Victoria, but is
equally cosmopolitan with origins as an American and Polish joint venture. In 1975,
four years after Abbott Laboratories and Ciech-Polfa first conducted feasibility trials,
Tasmanian Alkaloids P/L was officially established but with the firm's takeover in
1982, it has since been run by the US-based Johnson & Johnson. The Tasmanian poppy
industry is still mostly shared between these two transnationals even with the
recent arrival of one other new player. An all-Australian company founded in 2004,
TPI Enterprises was licensed in 2006, but it already sees itself as ``a world leader''
in ``the world market'' (TPI, 2006).
These corporations necessarily stress connections across Australia and the world.
A cartographic image of the state of Tasmania on the website homepage of TPI
Enterprises therefore insets Australia with aeroplanes facing north to the mainland
and beyond (see figure 3). While Australia is one of the world's largest consumers
of medical narcotics per capita, the industry has easily met all domestic demand
since 1972 and now exports mostly to the USA and Europe (INCB, 2008). So, as one
managing director states:
``Tasmania may seem far away but in fact, with the benefit of modern communi-
cations and transport, we can service world markets from our home base with
the minimum of delay. A worldwide network of distributors and agents has been
established to provide prompt and efficient local service for all of our customers''
(Tasmanian Alkaloids, 2004b).
The industry is also mediated by another network which results from international
treaties on drug control being sought throughout the 20th century and with some
(6) Back in Britain, Macfarlan Smith Ltd separated from the Glaxo Group with a management
buyout in 1990, was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1995 under the holding company
name Meconic (the Greek word for poppy), and acquired by the transnational corporation Johnson
Matthey in 2001 which purchased in 2006 the only UK company licenced to grow poppies, United
Farmaceuticals Ltd.
302 S Williams
14. formulated well before the UN's establishment.(7) Still most important today is the UN's
1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (amended by the 1972 Protocol). It is admin-
istered by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs which was established under the UN in
1946 and now linked to its Office of Drugs and Crime. The convention actually came into
force in 1964 (the same year trials began in Tasmania) and with the INCB created in 1968
when the US joined. Its official ratification by the Australian Commonwealth was in
1972 (with poppy cultivation in Turkey suspended but Tasmanian production flourish-
ing enough for export to commence). Recognition of the Convention has since grown,
with 186 nation-states signatories in 2007 and only eight not party to it (INCB, 2008,
page 15).(8)
As UN organisations extend their regulatory reach, drug manufacture worldwide
continues to affect Tasmania's poppy industry but as more than an essentialised global
other. For example, the INCB guarantees some countries markets for the narcotics
they produce and might otherwise traffic illegally but then limits its licensing of
production elsewhere to accommodate them. The world's largest importer of narcotic
material, the USA, has also restricted access to its markets after a resolution was
passed in 1979 by the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to address overproduction
and diversion in India and Turkey. The Drug Enforcement Administration, operating
inside the US Department of Justice, provided legislative effect with a trade agreement
implemented in 1981. The `80/20 Rule' or Law 1312.13 in the US Code of Federal
Australia Devonport
Launceston
TPI
Tasmania
Hobart
Figure 3. Promotional website image for TPI Enterprises.
(7) Although an International Opium Commission had met in Shanghai in 1909, the Hague Opium
Convention of 1912 was the first such international instrument. It was updated under the League of
Nations with the International Opium Convention of 1925, and the Convention for Limiting the
Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs of 1931. There are currently three
international conventions on drug control agreed through the UN: the 1961 Single Convention on
Narcotic Drugs (amended by the 1972 Protocol), the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances,
and the 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.
(8) Those states not party to the 1961 Convention include one in Africa (Equatorial Guinea),
one in Asia (Timor-Leste), and six in Oceania (Cook Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Samoa, Tuvalu,
and Vanuatu).
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 303
15. Regulations requires a minimum 80% of all narcotic raw materials entering the USA
be imported from India and Turkey, with the balance from Australia, France, Poland,
or Hungary if not from Spain which replaced Macedonia (formerly Yugoslavia) in 2007
(DEA, 2006; Jensema and Archer, 2005; PACB, 2006). Its significance is evident
as Spain led global morphine production in the first year of inclusion. After ousting
Australia and Turkey as the highest producers in previous years (2005 and 2006,
respectively), Spain is expected to maintain top spot just in front of them again in
2008 (see table 2).
Tasmania has so far defied the 80/20 Rule by developing a new strain of poppy.
In the late 1990s Tasmanian Alkaloids P/L used mutagenesis (rather than genetic
engineering per se) to create a variety of P. somniferum which has mostly thebaine
and no morphine in its latex (Fist, 2001). The alkaloid is still extracted as a concentrate
from poppy straw, but CPS-thebaine is unlike CPS-morphine because it remains
exempt from US legislation (PACB, 2006). Thebaine was once extracted mostly from
raw opium with concentrations of 1%, ten times higher than that usually found
in poppy straw (Mansfield, 2001). It was relatively unimportant with no direct use in
therapy and so was mostly converted to codeine. However, production has been rising
sharply since 1999 following development of the new poppy but also with a newfound
role for thebaine in the manufacture of such increasingly popular drugs as the
painkiller oxycodone and others including naloxone, naltrexone, and buprenorphine
with uses in detoxification, substitution, and maintenance programmes treating drug
dependence (INCB, 2007). Buprenorphine is the most unusual and prized for the dual
combination of agonist and antagonist effects it has on the central nervous system in
producing analgesic efficacy but low toxicity.(9) With such contradictory pharmaco-
logical capacities, however, improper use of thebaine poppies can, if ingested, induce
withdrawal (rather than narcotic sedation or overdose) as well as severe headache,
vomiting, and life-threatening convulsions. This type of toxicity most often occurs
when thebaine poppies are stolen mistakenly, as they still resemble their morphine-
rich counterparts. While this is an infrequent event, its deterrent effect explains the
reductions lately in local poppy thefts (Bruno, 2006; see also table 1).
These novel developments are peculiar to the state and the additional output
possible with thebaine has permitted Australia to keep abreast in the competitive field
of narcotics production. Therefore, any diminution in trend for Tasmania's poppy
industry is of lesser magnitude than the recent decline in Australia's output of
morphine equivalent (compare tables 1 and 2). However, the industry is still very
much influenced by its predominantly foreign ownership and international regulation
through licensing and trade agreements. There are other more internal issues including
problems with security viz the industry's cost to the state for the policing of crops and
having to protect them against local thefts, but minor perhaps compared with its
ongoing geopolitical problems. In light of the 80/20 Rule, for example, Tasmanian
Alkaloids P/L offered no poppy contracts whatsoever to farmers for the 1979 ^ 80 season
while contracts with GSK were cut by over half; and since then `major' price drops have
been recorded for the 1985 ^ 86, 1986 ^ 87, and 1991 ^ 92 harvests (DPIW, 2006).
(9) Most opiates are described as agonists and occur in natural, semisynthetic, or synthetic form
(such as morphine, oxycodone, or methadone, respectively). They work on specific receptor sites in
the brain to induce an analgesic or narcotic effect. Some opiates known as antagonists can bind
more strongly to these sites, reversing the agonist effects, and so are given as naloxone and
naltrexone, for example, either in overdose situations or to maintain abstinence. There is a further
special category of new semisynthetic opiates called the agonist ^ antagonists. They include drugs
such as buprenorphine (with its manufacture from the natural opiate thebaine developed in the
1970s and 1980s) which is valued for its dual qualities in having analgesic effect but reducing
problems of overdose and abuse.
304 S Williams
16. Tasmanian poppy production experienced another downturn after peaking earlier
this decade (see table 1). The impacts vary: the two main processors are diversified
transnationals able to survive such shifts (even nil production) whereas growers are
more directly affected. When Tasmanian media revealed GSK's plans in 2006 to cut
contracts by 90% ``in response to a world oversupply of opiate products and continuing
depressed prices'' the local shock reverberated as the company's farmgate payments
were expected to ``drop by up to [Aus] $12 million from $15 million'' (Waterhouse,
2006; see also Bevilacqua, 2006a; 2006b; Sayer, 2006). It is evident that this industry
continues to be shaped by multiple forces in having to find its place in the world.
In fact, GSK was the company criticised in 2006 only because Tasmanian Alkaloids
P/L had anticipated the global situation and made its cutbacks in 2003 and 2004
(Bevilacqua, 2006b). Embedded thus, geopolitically, Tasmania's success as a world
leader in narcotics production is seen as overdetermined, under threat, and no more
secure than the claims to isolation so often made on behalf of this island state and
especially in relation to its poppy industry.
Conclusion: beyond the rhetoric of drugs and of islands
Narcotics production in Australia is rather guarded, but this study has revealed a
complex geopolitics riven by contradiction. In particular, poppy cultivation and pro-
cessing are confined to Tasmania but entwine an array of different peoples and places in
dynamic ways at multiple scales all around the world. Despite their differences, islands
and drugs are together seen here depicted in territorialisations and legislations that try
to fix them in place by inscribing the geographical and medicojuridical boundaries and
dualisms of discursive (sometimes pictorial but also cartographic) rhetoric. The claims
made about the industry and its location in Tasmania relate to secrecy, novelty, unique-
ness, smallness, and remoteness as well as most frequently isolation. These factors
are cited in securing its position as an international leader amongst licit producers,
along with its ultramodern technology and innovation, but also in contrast to others
elsewhere, including the opium traditionally produced for illegal drugs. In this post-
structural reading of such representations, deconstruction has therefore assisted in
working over the familiar ground of the proper and of proper names as they identify
what might constitute property and propriety. The observations confirming here,
for example, that islands are both isolated and connected, and that any distinction
between pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs is unclear, are thus unsurprising and per-
haps even disappointing. However, this case study's value comes not from unlocking
secrets or resolving such differences and is instead found residing in their impossibility,
specifically, as aporia.
Interviewed about the rhetoric of drugs, Derrida relates the drugs crisis current in
the 1990s to such issues as the global war on drugs and HIV/AIDS plague when
stating: ``If today so many socio-ethico-political problems intersect and condense in
the problem of drugs... the impossibility of isolating a `drug problem' only becomes
all the more clear'' (1993a, page 17). He worries away at the divisions marking public
from private in this discourse, for example, and defining drugs as physical and natural
in contrast to the instituted norms of law and reason which aim to protect the
individual body as well as body politic. The boundaries thus identified are equally
evident in this case study and just as problematic for it is here that one finds ``at the
site of the pharmakon, both as poison and antidote... that supplementary discomfort
inherent in the indecidability between the two'' (1993a, page 7). The difficulty of this
situation extends to ``the impossibility of any theorem'' as neither one nor the other
drug practice can be accepted or prohibited without ``equivocations, negotiations
and unstable compromises'' but this is not necessarily perceived as bad by Derrida,
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 305
17. who states: ``The only attitude (the only politicsöjuridical, medical, pedagogical, etc.)
I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility
of an essentially interminable questioning, that is a critical and thus transforming
questioning'' (1993a, page 10).
This awkward uncertainty with its innumerable questions yet pressing need to make
a decision (and wanting especially to make the `right' one, for example, in relation to
the matter of drugs) characterises an aporos. Derrida, in discussing the rhetoric of
drugs, does not mention aporia but here in this case study both drugs and islands
are seen as such because of the impossibilities inscribed with their borders. As noted,
an aporos comprises that impasse or moment of impossibility through which one
must pass in approaching a threshold and pushing up against the limit. However, its
undecidability is not necessarily paralysing (contrary to what deconstruction's critics
so often suggest). Indeed, the aporos is actually affirmative and enables new possibil-
ities as it refuses preordained answers determined in relation to the Same and tries to
go beyond as response and responsibility arise in relation to the Other. For as Derrida
elsewhere comments, there is:
``no decision, in the strong sense of the word, in ethics, in politics, no decision, and
thus no responsibility, without the experience of some undecidability. If you don't
experience some undecidability, then the decision would simply be the application
of a programme, the consequences of a premiss or of a matrix. So a decision has to
go through some impossibility in order for it to be a decision ... . Ethics and politics
therefore start with undecidability'' (1999, page 66).
Therefore, to move beyond the rhetoric of drugs and islands (and the realities thus
fashioned), their impossibility might instead be regarded as an opportunity for change.
The legality and insularity posed in this case could be framed differently, with profound
consequences. As an addendum, the official UN data are not yet available but local
media reports indicate that the 2008 ^ 09 poppy harvest in Tasmania was very good.
This discourse, however, still figures the usual representations set inside the same
awkward boundaries. Also, the industry here was inspected by the INCB in 2009 to
meet compliance requirements and so security was topical. At the time of the INCB
visit, the chairman of the Tasmanian Poppy Growers Association was reported as
stating ``we hold ourselves out for the highest security in relation to the crop, in that
there isn't any diversion from the industry here in Tasmania into the illicit market''
(ABC News 2009). Such a claim unwisely leaves no room for error but its rigidity is
reflected in the INCB's own legislative rulings. One INCB delegate to Tasmania,
Dr Philip Emafo, from the World Health Organisation, for example, noted the Board's
objections to the harm-minimisation initiative of mainland Sydney's drug injecting
rooms. He is reported as saying ``that service should be provided without the use of
drugs obtained from illicit sources. We will be happy if the drugs used there are not
obtained from illicit sources. That is the only real disagreement'' (Grant, 2009a).
Australia has so far refused to take the step (anathema to the INCB) of legalising
heroin. It is only in working through such impossibilities that drug services have come
to be provided, including, however slowly, in Tasmania.
Insularity has likewise become an issue in Tasmania's 2008 ^ 09 poppy season. GSK
has just made another surprise announcement, now seeking to trial commercial opera-
tions in the state of Victoria. Its proposal was couched in terms of ``security of supply''
(Grant, 2009b). However, local growers are outraged and worried about losing their
monopoly. As the general manager of TPI Enterprises stated: ``Who knows where this
starts and ends it could well happen across the rest of Australia'' (McIntyre, 2009).
Tasmania's minister for agriculture also worried that ``any extension to poppy pro-
duction [interstate] could undermine the industry's tight security'' (Dakis, 2009).
306 S Williams
18. Conversely, in preparation for the season, GSK had provided contracts to fifteen
growers on 100 ha in a new location in Tasmania more insular again since it is
on King Island. Extending production to King Island was reported as presenting
challenges but ``about securing Australia's position as a reliable supplier... mak[ing]
sure we can secure demands for Tasmanian product'' (Wood, 2008). Whilst the inscrip-
tion and meaning of this industry's borders are contested across state and nation, its
enfolding of sociospatial relations around the globe remains undeniable and warrants
closer attention. Producers such as Turkey and Afghanistan remain intimately entwined,
further complicating its representations of insularity and legality. These two continental
nations are still so distant, even more isolated in parts, and very different from
Tasmania; and in Turkey's poppy industry seeds and not narcotics are the main cash
crop.(10) However, our paying attention to (not to mention learning from) such partic-
ularities can get lost in a global system of production that is determined mostly by its
international regulation under law. The prospect of effecting any meaningful change in
Afghanistan's currently illicit poppy industry is thus also constrained. It will certainly
need more than just licensing of the industry by the UN as differences in access to
land, credit, and water, and issues of food insecurity, dire poverty, and state instability
combine with the high prices paid for opium to create a persistently complex problem
(Chouvy, 2008; Grare, 2008). The inscription of legal, political, socioeconomic, cultural,
and religious limits will no doubt continue to be critical.
Likewise, in island studies, the importance of boundaries must be reemphasised.
As this emerging field of research struggles with the undecidability of borders in
relation to islands and islandness, and whilst it subsequently jettisons notions such as
insularity (despite their unrelenting use in discourses such as demonstrated here), any
slighting or dismissal of them begs reconsideration. It has therefore proven timely in
this analysis to look to poststructural thinking with Derrida's oeuvre providing key
insights. Of further interest is a particularly relevant passage that Hillis Miller (2007)
makes newly available from Derrida's unpublished 2002 ^ 03 seminars:
``Between my world, the `my world'; what I call `my world,' and there is no other
for me, every other world making up part of it, between my world and every
other world, there is initially the space and the time of an infinite difference, of an
interruption incommensurable with all the attempts at passage, of bridge, of isthmus,
of communication, of translation, of trope, and of transfer... .There is no world,
there are only islands'' (Derrida, cited in Hillis Miller, 2007, pages 265 ^ 266).
This is an ``amazing passage'', as Hillis Miller suggests. It advocates solitude and singu-
larity when most poststructural philosophers (and he cites Nancy, Lacan, and Le¨ vinas)
are focused on community and multiplicity. However, while no doubt intriguing island
scholars, Derrida's celebration of insularity will appeal to others as it relates a broader
political agenda. It also resonates with the opportunities availed by the aporetic
relation's impossibility for Derrida stresses the need for each of us to recognise our
own individual isolation if we are ever to forge an ethical relation with the other.
He suggests something similar, in A Taste for the Secret (Derrida and Ferraris, 2001,
page 27), by declaring ``I am not one of the family... don't count me in'' because
he does not want to ``lose himself in the herd'' and so become someone who ``loses
the others as well; the others become simply places, family functions, or places or
functions in the organic totality that constitutes a group, school, nation or community
of subjects speaking the same language.'' Likewise, in an essay from On the Name
Derrida (1995) likens rhetoric as mimesis or representation to the secret with a
closure found in its concepts, truth and meaning, which he then strains to get beyond.
(10) Such differences were noted by reviewers of this paper but see also Jensema and Archer (2005).
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 307
19. While one might use ``the secret ... as an impregnable resource'' or so as ``to secure
for oneself a phantasmatic power over others'' he dismisses such a deployment:
``That happens every day'' and he instead looks to how ``this very simulacrum still
bears witness to a possibility which exceeds it. It does not exceed it in the direction of
some ideal community, rather toward a solitude without any measure common to that
of an isolated subject'' (Derrida, 1995, page 30).
Derrida therefore dares us to be different and to explore the unimagined possibil-
ities that living on the edge and gnawing away at borders might enable. For it is only
through being insular, and in marking and re-marking (on) but then also in exceeding
and thus deconstructing the limit, as this study has demonstrated, that islands provide
us with such interesting and sometimes exceptional cases. Likewise, the impossibility of
islands is perhaps one of their most extraordinary secretsöif any secrets might remain
here or in deconstructionöhence the study of islands with all their paradoxes and
contradictions will continue to be important as they present new ethical and political
openings with significance beyond their own realms.
Acknowledgements. Thanks are due to Stuart Elden. This paper has also benefited from the
comments of four anonymous reviewers and from Australia's INCB representative (and former
Tasmanian Attorney General), Peter Patmore. Their broad-ranging observations reflect the topic's
multifaceted and compelling nature. The usual disclaimers apply.
References
ABC News 2009, ``Poppy growers welcome Narcotics Control Board inspections'', 12 February,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/02/12/2490156.htm
Armstrong H W, Read R, 2000, ``Comparing the economic performance of dependent territories
and sovereign micro-states'' Economic Development and Cultural Change 48 285 ^ 306
Armstrong H W, Read R, 2003,``The determinants of economic growth in small states'' The Round
Table 368 99 ^ 124
Armstrong H W, Read R, 2006, ``Geographical `handicaps' and small states: some implications
for the Pacific from a global perspective''Asia Pacific Viewpoint 47 79 ^ 92
Baldacchino G, 2000, ``The challenge of hypothermia: a six-proposition manifesto for small island
territories'' The Round Table 353 65 ^ 79
Baldacchino G, 2005, ``Editorial: Islandsöobjects of representation'' Geografiska Annaler B 87
247 ^ 251
Baldacchino G, 2006a,``Innovative development strategies from non-sovereign island jurisdictions?
A global review of economic policy and governance practices'' World Development 34 852 ^ 867
Baldacchino G, 2006b, ``Managing the hinterland beyond: two ideal-type strategies of economic
development for small island territories''Asia Pacific Viewpoint 47 45 ^ 60
Baldacchino G, 2006c, ``Small islands versus big cities: lessons in the political economy of regional
development from the world's small islands'' Journal of Technology Transfer 31 91 ^ 100
Baldacchino G (Ed.), 2007 AWorld of Islands: An Island Studies Reader (Institute of Island Studies,
University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown)
Baldacchino G, 2008,``Studying islands: on whose terms? Some epistemological and methodological
challenges to the pursuit of island studies'' Island Studies Journal 3 37 ^ 56
Baldacchino G, Milne D (Eds) 2000, Lessons from the Political Economy of Small Islands:
The Resourcefulness of Jurisdiction (Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hants)
BBC News 2009, ``Stoned wallabies make crop circles'', 25 June, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-
pacific/8118257.stm
Bertram G, 2006, ``Introduction: The MIRAB model in the twenty-first century''Asia Pacific
Viewpoint 47 1 ^ 13
Bevilacqua S, 2006a, ``Poppy cut defended'' The Sunday Tasmanian, 7 May, page 11
Bevilacqua S, 2006b, ``Hope for poppy future'' The Sunday Tasmanian, 7 May, page 60
Biagini E, Hoyle B (Eds), 1999 Insularity and Development: International Perspectives on Islands
(Pinter, London)
Booth M, 1996 Opium: A History (Simon and Schuster, London)
Briguglio L, 1995, ``Small island developing states and their economic vulnerabilities'' World
Development 23 1615 ^ 1632
308 S Williams
20. Bruno R, 2006 Tasmanian Drug Trends: Findings from the Illicit Drug Reporting Strategy (IDRS)
NDARC Technical Report No. 245, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, Sydney
Chouvy P A, 2008, ``Licensing Afghanistan's opium: solution or fallacy?'' Caucasian Review of
International Affairs 2 1 ^ 6
Chouvy P A, Laniel L R, 2007, ``Agricultural drug economies: cause or alternative to intra-state
conflicts?'' Crime, Law and Social Change 48 133 ^ 150
Clark E, 2004, ``The ballad dance of the Faeroese: island biocultural geography in an age of
globalisation'' Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95 284 ^ 297
Dakis S, 2009,``Opposition to poppy trials inVictoria''ABCRural,12 March, http://www.abc.net.au/
rural/tas/content/2009/03/s2514604.htm
DEA, 2006 Rulesö2006 US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, Office
of Diversion Control,Washington, DC, http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/fed regs/rules/
2006fr1004.htm
Department of Justice, 2005 Annual Report 2004 ^ 05 Tasmanian Department of Justice, Hobart,
http://www.justice.tas.gov.au/ data/assets/pdf file/53479/Justice Report 2004-05 with links
final.pdf
Department of Justice, 2006 Annual Report 2005 ^ 06 Tasmanian Department of Justice, Hobart,
http://www.justice.tas.gov.au/ data/assets/pdf file/67681/Justice Report 2005-06 Final.pdf
Derrida J, 1981 Dissemination translated by B Johnson (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)
Derrida J, 1992, ``Before the law'', in Acts of Literature Ed. D Attridge (Routledge, New York)
pp 181 ^ 220
Derrida J,1993a,``The rhetoric of drugs: an interview'', translated by M Israel Differences: A Journal
of Feminist Cultural Studies 5 1 ^ 25
Derrida J, 1993b, Aporias translated by T Dutoit (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA)
Derrida J, 1995, On the Name Ed. T Dutoit, translated by D Wood, J P Leavey, I McLeod
(Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA)
Derrida J, 1996, ``How to avoid speaking: denials'', translated by K Frieden, in Languages of the
Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory Eds S Budick,W Iser
(Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA) pp 3 ^ 70
Derrida J, 1999, ``Hospitality, justice and responsibility: a dialogue with Jacques Derrida'',
in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy Eds. R Kearney, M Dooley
(Routledge, London) pp 65 ^ 83
Derrida J, 2002, ``Faith and knowledge: the two sources of `religion' at the limits of reason alone'',
translated by S Weber, in Acts of Religion Ed. G Anidjar (Routledge, New York) pp 42 ^ 101
Derrida J, Ferraris M, 2001 A Taste for the Secret Eds G Donis, D Webb, translated by G Donis
(Polity Press, Cambridge)
DPIW, 2006, Industry ProfileöPoppies Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries and Water,
Hobart, http://www.dpiw.tas.gov.au/inter.nsf /WebPages/EGIL-5HU8V4
Fist A J, 2001, ``The Tasmanian poppy industry: a case study of the application of science
and technology'', in Proceedings of the 10th Australian Agronomy Conference, Hobart
29 January ^ 1 February, http://www.regional.org.au/au/asa/2001/plenary/1/fist/htm
Gralton A,Vanclay F, 2006, ``Quality food production, diversity and sustainability: opportunities
for small towns'', in The Changing Nature of Australia's Country Towns Eds M Rogers,
D M Jones (Victorian Universities Regional Research Network Press, Ballarat) pp 126 ^ 138
Grant R, 2009a, ``Poppy profits soar in 2009''ABC Rural 17 February,http://www.abc.net.au/rural/
content/2008/s2493541.htm
Grant R, 2009b, ``Green light for Vic poppy growing trial''ABC News, 11 March,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/11/2513155.htm
Grare F, 2008, ``Anatomy of a fallacy: the Senlis Council and narcotics in Afghanistan'',WP 34,
Centre for International Governance Innovation,Waterloo, Ontario
Hay P, 2006, ``A phenomenology of islands'' Island Studies Journal 1 19 ^ 42
Hillis Miller J, 2007, ``Derrida enisled'' Critical Inquiry 33 248 ^ 276
INCB, 2007 Narcotic Drugs: Estimated Requirements for 2008; Statistics for 2006 (United Nations,
New York)
INCB, 2008 Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2007 (United Nations,
New York)
Jensema E, Archer G, 2005, ``Licensed opium cultivation and production in the main producing
countries'', in Feasibility Study on Opium Licensing in Afghanistan for the Production of Morphine
and Other Essential Medicines Ed. D Spivack (MF Publishing, London) pp 123 ^ 190
King R, Connell J (Eds), 1999 Small Worlds, Global Lives: Islands and Migration (Pinter, London)
On islands, insularity, and opium poppies: Australia's secret pharmacy 309
21. King S, 1999, ``Early industry challenges'', in Poppies Beyond 2,000 ^ 20,000 Tasmanian Poppy
Growers Association Field Information/Exchange Day, 29 July, Moriarty
Laughlin J C, Chung B, Beattie B M, 1998, ``Poppy cultivation in Australia'', in Poppy: The Genus
Papaver Ed. J Bernath (Harwood Academic, Amsterdam) pp 249 ^ 277
McIntyre D, 2009, ``Outrage over Vic poppy trial''ABC News, 12 March, http://www.abc.net.au/
news/stories/2009/03/12/2513909.htm
Mansfield D, 2001An Analysis of Licit Opium Poppy Cultivation: India and Turkey report prepared
for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London
Morris M 1995,The PinkTriangle:The Gay Law Reform Debate inTasmania (UNSW Press, Sydney)
OGD, 2000, The World Geopolitics of Drugs 1998/1999 Annual Report of the Observatoire
Ge¨ opolitique des Drogues, Paris
PACB, 2005 Security Issues Poppy Advisory Control Board, Tasmanian Department of Justice,
Hobart, http://www.justice.tas.gov.au/poppy/the industry/security issues
PACB, 2006, ``Australian opiate alkaloid industry background briefing paper'', Tasmanian Poppy
Advisory Control Board, Ulverstone
Poisons Act, 1971 (Tas.), http://www.thelaw.tas.gov.au/tocview/index.w3p;cond=;doc id= 81%2B
%2B1971%2BGS1%2FEN%2B20091229000000;histon=;prompt=;rec=;term=
Rockliff J, 1999, ``Tasmanian Alkaloids Pty Ltd'', in Poppies Beyond 2,000 ^ 20,000 Tasmanian
Poppy Growers Association Field Information/Exchange Day, 29 July, Moriarty; copy
available from Dr Williams
Royle S A, 2001 A Geography of Islands: Small Island Insularity (Routledge, London)
Royle S A, 2007, ``Insularity and small island geography: a comparative review of island
geographies'', paper presented at the inaugural meeting of the IGU Commission on Islands
at Island Geographies International Conference, Taipei 29 October ^ 3 November,
http://igu-islands.giee.ntnu.edu/tw/conf papers.htm
Sayer, L, 2006, ``Farming future rethink'' The Tasmanian Mercury, 20 April, page 5
Sheridan M, Nagraj N, 2009, ``Wallabies in Tasmania, Australia, getting high on poppy plants,
creating crop circles: report'' New York Daily News 25 June, http://www.nydailynews.com/
news/us world/2009/06/25/2009-06-25 wallabies in tasmania australia getting high on
poppy plants creating crop_circl.html
Spivack D (Ed.), 2005 Feasibility Study on Opium Licensing in Afghanistan for the Production of
Morphine and Other Essential Medicines (MF Publishing, London)
Steinberg P, 2005, ``Insularity, sovereignty and statehood: the representation of islands on portolan
charts and the construction of the territorial state'' Geografiska Annaler B 87 253 ^ 264
Steinberg P, 2007, ``Geographic thought at the ocean ^ island interface: beyond `empty' oceans
and `insular' islands'', paper presented at the inaugural meeting of the IGU Commission on
Islands at Island Geographies International Conference, Taipei 29 October ^ 3 November,
http://igu-islands.giee.ntnu.edu/tw/conf papers.htm
Stratford E, 2003, ``Editorial: Flows and boundaries: small island discourses and the challenge of
sustainability, community and local environments'' Local Environment 8 495 ^ 499
Stratford E, 2006a, ``Technologies of agency and performance: Tasmania Together and the
constitution of harmonious island identity'' Geoforum 37 273 ^ 286
Stratford E, 2006b, ``Isolation as disability and resource: considering sub-national island status
in the constitution of the `New Tasmania''' The Round Table 386 575 ^ 588
Tasmanian Alkaloids, 2004a, ``Tasmania: Australia's Island State'', Tasmanian Alkaloids Pty Ltd,
http://www.tasalk.com.au/community/index/html
Tasmanian Alkaloids, 2004b, ``Introduction from the Managing Director'', Tasmanian Alkaloids
Pty Ltd, http://www.tasalk.com.au/letter.html
TPI, 2006, ``About TPI'', TPI Enterprises Pty Ltd, http://www.tpienterprises.com/about.php
Waterhouse C, 2006, ``Poppy farmers regroup'' The Tasmanian Mercury 19 April, page 7
Wood E, 2008, ``Poppy expands to King Island''ABC Rural 3 December, http://www.abc.net.au/
rural/tas/content/2006/s2436905.htm
Wood L, 1978, ``Poppies in Tasmania'' Geography 63 213 ^ 217
Wood L, 1987, ``The legal production of narcotic materials in Australia''Australian Geographer
18 161 ^ 165
Wood L, 1988, ``Not ordinary merchandise: world trends in the licit production of opiates''
Geography 73 149 ^ 151
ß 2010 Pion Ltd and its Licensors
310 S Williams
22. Conditions of use. This article may be downloaded from the E&P website for personal research
by members of subscribing organisations. This PDF may not be placed on any website (or other
online distribution system) without permission of the publisher.
