Williams 2013 GR

Licit Narcotics Production in Australia: Legal
Geographies Nomospheric and Topological
STEWART WILLIAMS
University of Tasmania, School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania,
Private Bag 78, Hobart, Tas. 7001, Australia. Email: stewart.williams@utas.edu.au
Received 3 February 2013; Revised 26 April 2013; Accepted 16 May 2013
Abstract
Licit narcotics production in Australia is based on the cultivation of a poppy crop
restricted to Tasmania under local, national, and international regulation. Its
legal geographical analysis is advanced by drawing on the thinking about ‘the
nomosphere’and ‘topology’developed by David Delaney and John Allen, respec-
tively. Australia continues to lead global production of licit narcotics as distinct
new entities, relationships, and capacities have been enabled by differentiating
between the constituent alkaloids morphine and thebaine with a loophole identi-
fied in US legislation of the 80/20 rule. Nomospheric and topological lenses are
used to focus on the intensive, emergent qualities of the industry in addition to the
traditional topography revealed in its scalar, networked territorialisation. A
renewed understanding of the spatial workings and power plays relevant can
inform possible transformation around narcotics production.
KEY WORDS legal geography; narcotics; nomosphere; poppy; Tasmania;
topology
Introduction
Humans have cultivated opium poppy (Papaver
somniferum) over the millennia for fuel, food,
and fodder, but the plant is especially prized for
its opiate or narcotic alkaloid content. Australia’s
commercial cultivation and processing of poppy
was established following trials in the 1960s.
Despite some fluctuations, it has since continued
to account for up to half of all licit narcotic raw
materials produced in the world each year
(Wood, 1988; Williams, 2010). This Australian
industry is restricted to the island state of Tasma-
nia and administered by the government there,
but the United Nations’ (UN) International Nar-
cotics Control Board (INCB) also has a critical
presence in regulating production.
Distinctly situated in space and law, the Aus-
tralian poppy industry is analysed here with a
mixed methods approach providing the rich
empirical description deemed so critical in legal
geography. For as Holder and Harrison (2003, 3)
state: ‘Context is everything.’ The spatial work-
ings and power plays shaping this global industry
are then explored with reference to David
Delaney’s and John Allen’s ‘nomospheric’ and
‘topological’ theorisations, respectively.
The paper comprises three sections. First, the
legal geography framework is explained with ref-
erence to conceptual work based on notions of
the nomosphere and topology. Second, the pro-
duction of narcotic raw material in Australia is
examined as it has been constituted in the
traditional topography of scalar, networked
territorialisation and in the more intensive land-
scape of emergent relations. Third, the findings
and their implications are discussed in light of
nomospheric and topological theorisations.
Legal geography, the nomosphere,
and topology
Over the last two decades (at least) a significant
body of scholarship has emerged at the intersec-
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364 Geographical Research • November 2013 • 51(4):364–374
doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12025

tion of law and geography. Theoretical interests
and empirical concerns in the legal and geo-
graphic disciplines were initially combined
through an interpretative turn (Blomley and
Clark, 1990). As Clark (1986) once argued, the
law is practised in specific environments as a
manifestation of structural power that permits
local agency, and Pue (1990) likewise notes the
particularity of place alongside law’s general
abstractions. More recently, Delaney (2003)
describes legal geography in terms of word and
world. He follows Sarat in observing how law ‘is
all over’ and geography ‘is everywhere’ such that
there is an endless array of legal geographies
with ‘an infinitely rich field of instantiations and
combinations at every scale from the micro-
corporeal to the extra-planetary’ (Delaney, 2003,
67).
Legal geography scholars have identified
numerous entities, issues, and settings in which
law and space are seen to intersect. They include
state legislation influencing access to natural
resources, employment, education, housing or
health services; the distinctions made between
public and private space in relation to such
diverse things as gardening and sexuality; the
zoning or enclosure of spaces as they range from
individuals’ bodies and homes through to work-
places and institutions including hospitals and
prisons; and the holding, sharing, and sale or
exchange of rights and responsibilities in real
property, natural commodities, and the global
commons (see, for example, Blomley et al.,
2001; Holder and Harrison, 2003; Blomley,
2004).
David Delaney’s nomosphere
In legal geographical scholarship, space is
increasingly imagined not as an inert surface on
which law is inscribed or enacted. Rather, the
world is seen as being constantly and actively
constituted in spatial and legal terms through the
material stuff of things as much as the relation-
ships amongst them (Delaney, 2001; 2003; 2010;
Whatmore, 2002; 2003; Blomley, 2007). Both
the materiality of the world and our relationships
with it are caught up in the workings of power
(capable both of having power effects and of
being affected by it).
For Delaney (2010) political power insinuates
our world as a ‘nomosphere’ – a term coined to
capture the material and performative as well as
symbolic and imaginary aspects to the unfolding
of society through space and law. It thus com-
prises ‘nomoscapes’constructed in ‘nomospheric
projects’ that he describes as hegemonic,
counter-hegemonic, or situated somewhere
between these two poles. His neologisms evince
a Schmittian theorisation with familiar implica-
tions. Such projects are imbricated in the exer-
cise of power in constituting and reconstituting
the world in terms of its legal geographies. They
are therefore still seen to be conceived and
enacted
. . . in order to affect and justify exclusions,
separations and confinements in order to
enhance control, domination, exploitation and
marginalisation of others, or the comfort or
discretion of those who benefit by prospective
(prescriptive) transformations. The very idea
is to affect the situational distribution of
power. (Delaney, 2010, 149 his emphasis)
Delaney’s ‘pragmatics of world-making’ oper-
ates in three ways. The two main ones are
‘respatialisation’ and ‘resignification’ that entail
one another as the perquisites of power and
authority. The former functions by ‘drawing,
redrawing or relocating boundaries, lines, thresh-
olds (diminishment); giving these new material
forms (a wall goes, a barbed-wire fence comes
down, a check-point is set up or abandoned)’
to reconfigure nomoscapes; the latter does so
by modifying relationships ‘within a setting
or . . . between settings – access, exclusion,
expulsion, confinement, invasion etc (the purifi-
cation of public space, the invention of criminal
protection orders, or safety plans, the crafting of
exceptions to the Fourth Amendment warrant
requirement)’ often along nomospheric lines of
public/private, domestic/foreign, or similar dis-
tinction (Delaney, 2010, 150). Third, transforma-
tion can be effected through ‘novel – often
transgressive – embodied performances that dis-
confirm prevailing and privileged encodings’
(Delaney, 2010, 150), but such undertakings,
exemplified by land invasions, sit-ins, blockades,
walk-outs, and strikes, are risky as well as
unusual.
This nomospheric work has extended our
thinking in legal geography. Notably, it figures
the entanglements of human and non-human
material relations constituted in space and law.
It also endeavours to resist territorialism’s
‘container-like “spaces” that impose a rigid
in/out; either/or structure to the world’ (Delaney,
2010, 90). However, it does then return to a more
traditional, topographic power geometry. Dyna-
mism and change are important for Delaney
but driven primarily by human actors engaging
S. Williams: Licit Narcotics Production in Australia 365
© 2013 The Author
Geographical Research © 2013 Institute of Australian Geographers

with the state’s control over a jurisdiction, for
example, or the division of land into individual,
cadastral parcels. Another perspective, one that is
more explicitly topological than territorial, there-
fore proves useful here.
John Allen’s topology
Work by Allen and colleagues on the twists and
turns of state power understood in terms of topol-
ogy starts from the premise that national
territorialisations are no longer sufficient ‘to
make sense of a state whose powers have been
dispersed, decentred and fragmented’ (Allen and
Cochrane, 2010, 1071). It does not address law
per se but the interest in state power and politics
provides a valuable entry point to consider some
of the latest thinking about issues of scale and
territory that are otherwise little explored in legal
geography.
Allen, along with scholars such as Agnew,
Brenner, Elden, Jessop, Jones, and Marsden
(as well as his own co-authors), sees
reconfigurations as necessary to how we think
about state, territory, and sovereignty. It is most
apparent in our current context of globalisation
that there is no definite inside or outside to the
supposedly pre-given spatial containers of insti-
tutionalised power. Various other private and
non-government players such as security firms,
commercial regulators, and environmental agen-
cies are also now recognised for their key roles in
operating alongside the state. Traditional hierar-
chies of territorialisation and movements of
power either upwards or downwards have given
way generally to a flattening of scale and to what
are described in work by Allen (2011a; 2012) as
more than relational geographies of assemblage.
Despite the efforts to better explain today’s
multi-centric landscapes through rescaling, Allen
(2012, 192) suggests that we are still left with ‘a
rather passive geography where the mix of space/
times embedded in the entanglement of distrib-
uted entities largely fails to register’. His work
therefore has a strong resonance with Delaney’s
work on nomospherics. Indeed, Allen similarly
wants to capture some of the unusual and even
contradictory as well as contingent dynamics of
world-making. For example, Allen (2011a, 154)
is interested in assemblage thinking as it admits
‘the possibility that heterogeneous elements can
hold together without actually forming a coher-
ent whole.’ So, with others he critiques the logic
of containment in biosecurity’s ‘fixed disease
geometry’ and advocates instead a mapping
‘through which disease is understood as rela-
tional; that is, both integral to, and always part of,
an entangled interplay of environments, hosts,
pathogens and humans’ (Hinchcliffe et al., 2012,
1–2).
Allen (2011a) sees danger in endless empirical
description but counters it with the benefits of
strong spatial conceptualisation. Therefore,
while he focuses on the world’s constitution as it
emerges through the relationships amongst
things (as does Delaney), he also draws on the
mathematical notion of topology, revealing how
the intensive relationships of distance, proximity,
and reach can be profoundly folded and twisted
(Allen and Cochrane, 2010; Allen, 2011a; 2011b;
2012). The powerful but messy, non-Euclidean
landscape of topology is one that ‘disrupts our
sense of what is near and what is far by loosening
defined times and distances’ (Allen, 2011b, 290).
In contrast to any fixed geometry it is a place
‘where proximity and presence are not straight-
forward givens’ (Allen, 2012, 192).
Indeed, the way in which assemblages hold
together without actually forming coherent
wholes is arguably attributable to a geography
of relations and things that is, in part, assem-
bled through parts of elsewhere. (Allen, 2012,
192)
Of course, Allen is rightly adamant that tradi-
tional topography retains a strong hold in our
geographic imagination. His point ‘is not that
territory or scale have been superseded or ren-
dered obsolete’ (2011b, 286). Rather, he explores
what a topological perspective can add to our
understanding of how power gets practised.
Allen’s insights therefore resonate well with
Delaney’s nomospheric thinking. Together they
can inform legal geographical analysis in criti-
cally new and sophisticated ways as demon-
strated here with narcotics production.
Analysing the spatio-legal constitution of
Australian narcotics production
The Australian poppy industry was established as
a new commercial venture in the island state of
Tasmania in the 1960s and 1970s. Opium poppy
had been grown on the Australian mainland
during the Second World War but only as a
wartime measure for the emergency production
of biodiesel from the seed. The industry in its
new form, with focus on processing opiate or
narcotic alkaloid content for pharmaceutical
manufacturing, has entered a different realm and
specifically one of drug regulation with attendant
geopolitics (Williams, 2010; Evered, 2011a).
© 2013 The Author

After the Second World War a decision was
made by pharmaceuticals manufacturers based
in Britain to extend beyond the northern hemi-
sphere their production of narcotics for use in
analgesia. Major international companies estab-
lished the industry in Australia, starting with a
subsidiary of Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline or
GSK) soon followed by Tasmanian Alkaloids
(owned by Johnson & Johnson). They have
recently been joined by a third (much smaller,
local) firm named TPI Enterprises. Their suc-
cesses have built on competitive advantages that
range from the suitability of soils and climate
through to the island’s small population and
isolated location. Ongoing development relies
on state and industry working together to make
significant investments with high-tech inputs,
but regulatory requirements also have to be
met.
Analysis of the Australian poppy industry’s
legal geography used mixed methods to generate
and examine qualitative and quantitative data.
Production details are intentionally not well
publicised for such a sensitive and closely con-
trolled crop but the UN does make available
annual statistics. Textual data were obtained
from the publications of various regulatory agen-
cies and from a concurrent research project led
by the author examining developments in this
Australian industry. In-depth, semi-structured
interviews of up to two hours’duration were con-
ducted in 2012 with 15 key informants from state
agencies in agricultural production, extension,
justice, and policing or private firms in farming,
processing, transport, and infrastructure. The
interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed
for content analysis. Other data are drawn
from the author’s field notes and photo-
documentation.
A familiar geometry of scalar territorialisation
Restricting the Australian poppy industry to Tas-
mania was decided amongst all state and territory
governments with a Commonwealth agreement
signed in 1971. It is administered by the Tasma-
nian state government’s Department of Justice
(DoJ) under the Poisons Act (Tas) 1971. A local
statutory body, the Poppy Advisory and Control
Board (PACB), licenses farmers who have been
vetted through police checks and hold contracts
with one or more of the state’s three poppy pro-
cessors to grow poppy in accordance with legal
requirements. The number of licenses to be
issued and the areas of poppy to be cultivated are
negotiated each year between state and federal
governments and the INCB to reflect desired
outputs and production levels.
Data on poppy cultivation and processing of
raw narcotic materials are reported by Australia
each year to the UN. Like all other nations that
are signatories to the UN Single Convention on
Narcotic Drugs 1961, Australia provides annual
data on imports, exports, and expected require-
ments of narcotics. These data are used ‘for
control purposes and to meet the needs of
researchers, enterprises and the general public’
and ‘inform Governments of the limits within
which international trade in and manufacture of
narcotic drugs may be conducted during a given
year’(INCB, 2011, 3). All but nine of the world’s
nations are signatories to the 1961 Single Con-
vention (most are also signatories to its amend-
ment in the 1972 Protocol).
There is a familiar geometry of scalar
territorialisation evinced as the countries that
produce narcotics are authorised (or not) to
operate under their own legislation as well as UN
regulations. At present there are six major
producers of licit narcotics including traditional
growers India and Turkey. Recent arrivals Aus-
tralia, France, and Spain are described as new
producers together with the longer established
producer Hungary. All use modern industrial
methods in harvesting and processing the crop as
dry poppy straw except for India, which still
manufactures opium from latex scraped by hand
and collected off the green poppy heads. While
they all are licensed to export raw narcotic
materials, Australia leads world production even
though the industry is based in a small, sub-
national state. As an employee of GSK correctly
points out:
All of GSK’s poppy production is based here
in Tasmania, at this stage. We produce about
25% of the world’s legal opiate or narcotic
material. Our friends at Johnson & Johnson
up the road produce approximately the other
25% of it. So half of the world’s legal opiate
is coming out of Tasmania at the moment
(Participant 5).
In contrast to the work of the INCB is that
undertaken by the UN Office on Drugs and
Crime (UNODC). It operates in the management
of what has become a global drugs problem. Its
latest annual report provides details on ‘produc-
tion, trafficking and consumption and the conse-
quences of illicit drug use in terms of treatment,
drug related diseases and drug-related deaths’
(UNODC, 2012, 1).
© 2013 The Author

The UNODC identifies six nations as the main
ones producing illicit narcotics. The traditional
producers Afghanistan and Pakistan are respon-
sible for most of the output from the region
known as the golden crescent (in South-west
Asia) whereas the Lao People’s Democratic
Republic and Myanmar are significant in the
region known as the golden triangle (in South-
east Asia). With the emergence of illegal narcot-
ics production in Latin America where it was
once absent, Colombia and Mexico are now
adding opium to coca production. While all six of
these nations are signatories to the UN Single
Convention, unregulated poppy cultivation and
processing occur on a large scale inside (and
across) their borders, which prohibits them from
providing narcotics to the world on a legal basis.
In this landscape, bounded spatial units are
variously connected or disconnected along lines
of distinction, for example, as licit or not. Like-
wise, their extension in space is subject to the
hierarchical, scalar effects of institutional author-
ity. For example, Australian output peaked in
2002 as ‘a result of strong world demand plus an
attempt by the manufacturers to build safe raw
material stock levels’ (DoJ, 2003, 66). In the
mid-2000s, it was ‘reduced significantly . . . in
reaction to world oversupply’ (DoJ 2007, 50).
Australian output has since been allowed to
recover, reaching unprecedented levels from
2010 onwards (Tables 1 and 2). Measured in
terms of both hectares of poppy cultivated and
tonnes of alkaloid equivalent produced, the high
levels of output in 2010 were not only more or
less sustained in 2011 but significantly surpassed
in 2012, the latest year available for such data
(INCB, 2011; DoJ, 2012).
Efficiencies are situated with industry players
in the form of high-tech investments and are thus
found alongside the comparative advantages of
soil and climate that get fixed all-too-simply in
space. The Australian industry’s location in what
is deemed ‘the safest area in the world’ (Partici-
pant 3) likewise garners critically important
international support. Tasmania’s island geogra-
phy offers the industry insularity and isolation,
affording a sense of security, yet it boasts global
connectedness, aligned with transnational firms
and supranational agencies while distanced from
production elsewhere that is illicit and inefficient
(Williams, 2010). Indeed, some interference and
diversion, albeit minimal, does occur each year
in Australian production (DoJ, 2011, 2012).
Contingencies and inconsistencies appear
elsewhere too. For example, poppy cultivation in
Turkey has variously been legal and illegal. It
was licensed in the 1970s amid international geo-
political concerns, including the start to the US
Table 1 World licit and illicit cultivation of poppy: 2004–2011 (cultivation in hectares, by country).
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Licit cultivation
Australia 12 222 11 232 8 296 9 201 12 909 15 886 21 904 –
France 9 319 9 365 8 076 6 085 6 295 9 839 10 500 10 300
Hungary 7 084 5 106 4 322 6 724 3 983 8 204 11 289 –
India 18 591 7 833 6 976 6 158 4 680 11 020 15 851 –
Spain 6 982 5 292 2 146 7 347 10 000 12 000 11 912 10 746
Turkey 30 343 25 335 42 023 38 850 35 104 60 328 55 296 61 368
Total 84 541 64 163 71 839 74 365 72 971 117 277 126 752 82 414
Illicit cultivation
Afghanistan 131 000 104 000 165 000 193 000 157 000 123 000 123 000 131 000
Colombia 3 950 1 950 1 023 715 394 356 341 –
Lao PDR 6 600 1 800 2 500 1 500 1 600 1 900 3 000 4 100
Mexico 3 500 3 300 5 000 6 900 15 000 19 500 14 000 –
Myanmar 44 200 32 800 21 500 27 700 28 500 31 700 38 100 43 600
Pakistan 1 500 2 438 1 545 1 701 1 909 1 779 1 721 362
Other countries 5 190 5 212 4 432 4 184 8 600 7 700 10 500 13 300
Total 195 940 151 500 201 000 235 700 213 003 185 935 190 662 206 703
Note: All figures are for area sown except in the case of licit cultivation between 2004 and 2006 where, due to limited data,
figures are for area harvested that can be less than figures for area sown. Total licit cultivation excludes figures here for countries
producing small quantities for domestic use. Total illicit cultivation in 2011 exceeds the sum of individual figures as it includes
an estimate of 14 341 hectares for Latin America (including Colombia and Mexico) otherwise not shown. Source: INCB (2008;
2011) and UNODC (2012).
© 2013 The Author

war on drugs, though Turkish farmers grow
poppy for the seed more than alkaloid content
(Williams, 2010; Evered, 2011b; 2011c). Simi-
larly, the UNODC (2012, 27) notes ‘a consider-
able level of illicit opium poppy cultivation is
estimated to occur in India, where the licit pro-
duction of opium has taken place for decades.’
This legal geography’s dynamism and slipperi-
ness warrants nomospheric and topological
approaches in its analysis.
An emergent, intensive landscape
The extensive topography of containment and
exclusion noted above is not ﬁxed but prone to
slippages and movement. It is marked through
the ongoing inscription of legal and spatial
boundaries yet the fences encountered securing
farm paddocks and processing factories in Tas-
mania (Figures 1, 2, and 3) are quite open and
porous. In similar fashion, Hinchcliffe et al.
(2012, 2) discuss ‘the disease geometry that
tends to conceptualise healthy life and disease as
separate spaces, with biosecurity understood as a
practice of demarcating and shoring up border-
lines’ that they critique in terms of the limits to
this will to closure, and instead map ‘an alterna-
tive understanding of biopolitics and biosecurity,
one in which the powers of life often fold over
Table 2 Australia’s cultivation of morphine and thebaine poppy: 2004–2011 (estimated area sown and actual area harvested in
hectares).
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Poppy rich in morphine
Estimated area sown 7 400 6 700 4 900 4 982 5 250 10 506 12 770 14 050
Actual area harvested 6 644 6 599 3 457 4 661 4 108 4 598 9 127 12 157
Poppy rich in thebaine
Poppy total (morphine and thebaine)
Note: Figures for 2011 are based on advance data as submitted by the Government to the INCB. Figures for areas cultivated with
morphine-rich poppy from 2010 to 2011 include cultivation of an opium poppy rich in codeine. It was estimated that 800 hectares
would be cultivated with 613 hectares then sown, and 580 hectares harvested in 2010. The estimate for cultivation in 2011 is 360
hectares with advance data suggesting that 313 hectares were actually harvested in 2011.
Source: INCB (2006; 2008; 2011)
Figure 1 Tasmanian poppy crop in ﬂower, Midlands (photograph by author).
© 2013 The Author

into the power over life, and undermine its very
possibility.’
With poppy, those growers and processors
submitting to regulation are controlled right
down to the level of the plant’s active ingredients
where signiﬁcant differences pertain. In this
emergent, intensive landscape possibilities are
opened up as well as closed down in the different
relationships and outcomes arising through
encounters with the industry’s living, biological
plant material. The alkaloids contained in opium
and poppy straw and the latter’s semi-processed
form (concentrate of poppy straw) include mor-
phine, codeine, thebaine, noscapine, oripavine,
papaverine, and narceine. They occur at different
points in the plant’s chemical pathways and
appear in industrial production processes as
starter materials and intermediate or end prod-
ucts. Only some are subject to regulation:
Morphine and codeine are under international
control because of their potential for abuse,
Figure 2 Tasmanian Alkaloids factory, Westbury (photograph by author).
Figure 3 GlaxoSmithKline factory, Latrobe (photograph by author).
© 2013 The Author

while thebaine and oripavine are under such
control because of their convertibility into
opioids subject to abuse. Noscapine, papaver-
ine and narceine are not under international
control. (INCB, 2011, 50)
Of these alkaloids, the Australian industry
has had a longstanding focus on morphine and
codeine, but it has shifted recently with invest-
ments in research and the development of pro-
duction pathways using other alkaloids such
as thebaine. The increased sophistication of
plant breeding, horticultural practices, and pro-
cessing have all found synergies with the
growth in international demand for pharmaceu-
ticals such as oxycodone. Subsequently, in Tas-
mania the cultivation and processing of new
poppy strains rich in thebaine has boomed and
recently superseded that of morphine poppy
(Table 2).
Illicit production around the world relies on
the traditional manufacture of opium, but most
licit production uses modern industrial processes
to extract specific alkaloids. As the official sta-
tistics most recently recorded:
About 88 per cent of the morphine and 96 per
cent of the thebaine manufactured worldwide
were obtained from poppy straw, while the
remainder was extracted from opium. Aus-
tralia, France, Spain and Turkey continued to
be the main producer countries in 2010,
together accounting for about 95 per cent of
global production of poppy straw rich in mor-
phine. Australia, France and Spain were the
only producers of poppy straw rich in
thebaine in 2010. India remained the sole licit
supplier of opium to the world market.
(INCB, 2011, 73)
The Australian industry’s domination of the
global production of raw narcotic materials is
associated with increases in both its areas under
cultivation and efficiencies in processing. In
addition to the farmers and processors seeking to
maximise the crops planted and overseen by
them and the PACB, the farmers are paid on
assay and so compete amongst themselves to
produce the ‘top crop’ in any one year for the
firm to which they are contracted. Alkaloid
content has continued to rise sharply of late in
thebaine and morphine poppy. A Tasmanian
industry representative explained, in 2000:
. . . we were getting 10 kilograms per hectare
of alkaloid content out. In 2010, we were
getting 20 kilograms per hectare of alkaloid
content. That’s now at 25 kilograms per
hectare and we are now reaching top crop, not
average, our top crop for the last 2 years with
Tasmanian Alkaloids have been getting 73
kilograms per hectare . . . Glaxo, their top
crop in morphine did 73 kilograms as well,
which is huge . . . Our competitors throughout
the world wouldn’t be doing 10 kilograms, if
less, they are doing less in most instances
(Participant 3).
The presence of thebaine has been key to the
industry’s ongoing success. Manufacture and
trade in this alkaloid occurs in a form of
thebaine-rich concentrate of poppy straw. Glob-
ally, production started in 1998 and has risen
steadily to peak at 197 tons in 2010 (the latest
year for which data is available) of which 88%
was produced by Australia; a total of 148 tons
was imported worldwide with the USA account-
ing for ‘almost 100 per cent of those imports’
(INCB, 2011, 79).
There have also been critically important rela-
tionships with the UN and the US government. In
1979, UN Resolution 471 called on importing
countries to support traditional suppliers of nar-
cotic raw materials and to limit imports from new
producers. Its intention in regulating global pro-
duction has always been to ensure a legitimate
market for materials that might otherwise enter
the illicit drug trade. The resolution was
reaffirmed by the UN in 1981. The US Depart-
ment of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administra-
tion (DEA) subsequently passed the Code of
Federal Regulations, Section 1312.13 Issuance
of import permit. The 80/20 rule is a central part
of this administrative law regulating ‘the impor-
tation of approved narcotic raw material (opium,
poppy straw and concentrate of poppy straw)’
such that:
At least eighty (80) percent of the narcotic
raw material imported into the United States
shall have as its original source Turkey and
India. Except under conditions of insufficient
supplies of narcotic raw materials, not more
than twenty (20) percent of the narcotic raw
material imported into the United States
annually shall have as its source Spain,
France, Poland, Hungary and Australia.
(DEA, n.d.)
Since 1981, it has been amended and
redesignated several times (including in 2006,
for example, to replace the former Yugoslavia
with Spain as a source country).
© 2013 The Author

The rule has been resisted in Australia as the
USAis a major importer of narcotic raw material.
A research participant recalled representing Tas-
manian farmers on a delegation to the USA:
So we competed in that market and the poppy
growers lobbied the Congress, the Judiciary
Sub-committee on Crime. We went there in
1991 to lobby them against this 80/20 rule
because the dynamics of the world were
changing and we were increasing productiv-
ity, and we had a secure environment, and so
they were going to progressively reduce the
80/20 rule at about 5% a year. We stayed there
for five weeks while this was going to happen.
The major pharmaceutical companies, the
opium based pharmaceutical companies and
the Turkish and Indian Governments, they
lobbied harder than what we did, and as we
were on the plane home we got the word to
say: ‘She’s all over, rover . . . it is still in
place; there will be no relaxation of that law’
(Participant 3).
The 80/20 rule holds, but Australia has domi-
nated global production through a loophole. The
quanta of opium, poppy straw, and concentrate of
poppy straw permissibly imported into the USA
are assessed on morphine content alone. The
Australian industry has therefore grown by
investing in the cultivation and processing of
poppy rich in thebaine. Tasmania’s state govern-
ment was recently able to report:
The DEA has reviewed the method in which
the ‘80/20’ rule is calculated. Based on the
review, DEA has concluded that it will con-
tinue the methodology currently utilised. The
decision is very important for the future of the
industry, and represents a considerable benefit
to the State (DoJ, 2009, 56).
Discussion: how law and space can make
worlds of difference
The production of licit narcotics in Australia is
constituted in complex ways. In ‘instances of the
materialization of the legal’ it appears ‘the legal
is also materialized through the various modes of
spatialization’ (Delaney, 2010, 22). The world as
nomosphere arises in a multiplicity of legal geog-
raphies that are continuously being re-spatialised
and re-signified. For example, the UN regulates
poppy cultivation and processing defined as legal
or illegal in territorial terms that are relatively
fixed and contained but not wholly so. For licit
narcotics production the UN’s high-level nego-
tiations mostly involve a handful of countries,
including Australia, but connect with transna-
tional pharmaceuticals companies and other
players such as state governments and local
farmers. Its multi-scalar terrain can be imagined
in a topological analysis as a ‘flattened land-
scape’ in which
. . . the things that circulate across ever greater
distances can be tracked, associations can be
traced, and connections mapped in a conven-
tional cartographic manner. There is a familiar
topography to all this movement and exten-
sion that would not be out of place in any
conventional mapping of flat surfaces charac-
terized by measured distances and well-
defined proximities (Allen, 2011b, 288–289).
Also, there are intensive relations and points of
emergence where entanglements of the human
and nonhuman have powerful effects. The
success of the Australian industry as one of the
world’s main suppliers of licit narcotic raw
materials has involved the relatively safe and
secure as well as highly efficient production of
alkaloids from the island state of Tasmania. Yet
the enfolding of society and space links it to the
US legislation of the 80/20 rule that has subse-
quently been reworked in Tasmania to present
novel opportunities for the Australian poppy
industry. Differentiation of thebaine from mor-
phine has proven critical in exploiting a gap that
has been retained in the rule’s methods of calcu-
lation. Still, such regulation is always subject to
change, and is therefore closely watched by
stakeholders.
In the spatial workings and power plays of this
global industry, institutional authorities, govern-
ment agencies, private firms, and others have
been brought into ‘more or less direct presence
through mediated and distanciated forms of
reach’ (Allen and Cochrane, 2010, 1082). Also,
with a legacy stretching out (and reaching in)
from more than three decades ago, the 80/20 rule
draws attention to the temporal as well as spatial
twists and turns in this topology:
What happens elsewhere, in far-off places,
and what is drawn from the past to make the
present possible, are all part of the topological
equation, where presence does not have to be
local, nor part of the same moment or time
period, to be a link in a newly formed
networked arrangement (Allen, 2011b, 288).
The legal geographies of narcotics production
are highly contingent as well as dynamic and
© 2013 The Author

susceptible to slippage. In bringing together all
sorts of peoples, places and practices, the
co-constitution of licit and illicit worlds reaches
into the future as well as the past. Delaney’s
conclusions on the spatial and legal pragmatics
of world-making are insightful:
The overwhelming bulk of world-making
happens elsewhere. The point is to draw atten-
tion to the contingency of the worlds so made
and to the alternative worlds imagined but
(provisionally) foreclosed, and to alternative
worlds still to be imagined and (no less provi-
sionally) constructed. (Delaney, 2010, 194–5)
Following Allen and Delaney, a nomospheric
and topological reading of the legal geographies
of narcotics production might further engage the
landscapes of possibility onto which it opens.
Australia and Afghanistan, for example, are
counterpoised in terms of the legality (or not) of
narcotics production but are also of interest
perhaps as they rank, respectively, among the
world’s most affluent and most impoverished
nations. For illicit production, globally, the area
under poppy increased from 191 000 hectares in
2010 to 207 000 hectares in 2011 with Afghani-
stan responsible for 63% of all cultivation
(UNODC, 2012, 26–7). Of a potential 7000 tons
of opium manufactured there in 2011, one half is
estimated to have been consumed or trafficked as
raw opium; the other processed into approxi-
mately 467 tons of heroin (UNODC, 2012, 26).
Conversely, even with the global production of
licit morphine growing over the last two decades,
the highest total licit output for any one year
(attained in 2007) was still only 440 tons (INCB,
2011, 80). While traditional practices of poppy
cultivation and processing in Afghanistan are
highly inefficient in contrast to those in Australia,
they underpin rural livelihoods there. For the
growing seasons between 2002/03 and 2005/06,
the value of opium exported each year has ranged
from over 60% down to 38% of Afghanistan’s
gross domestic product: (Felbab-Brown, 2005;
Goodhand, 2008).
This imbalanced if not simply warped geogra-
phy has been discussed elsewhere (Williams,
2010) with an emphasis on spatio-legal bounda-
ries. That work notes the international and
community-based efforts either to facilitate or
resist Afghanistan’s possible move into licit nar-
cotics production, but looking to effect change
primarily ‘from above’ via legislation. It simi-
larly discusses the licensing of production in
Australia and national competition, but it
remains focused on the territorial state as the key
player. Tasmania’s state government is, however,
holding an inquiry right now into the vexed
matter of perhaps importing Turkish poppy into
Australia to be processed. Notably, the interna-
tional machinations and debate at state level are
being driven by local political concerns: ‘The
Tasmanian Government has given in principle
support for poppy processor TPI Industries to
import raw poppy straw from Turkey to make up
a shortfall. Poppy growers are opposed to the
move and say poppies processed in Tasmania
should be grown in Tasmania’ (Dakis, 2013).
Such developments in this legal geography point
up the constant need for its ever more nuanced
interpretation.
Conclusion
The notion of topology permits complex, emer-
gent configurations to be understood where topo-
graphy’s ‘spatial geometry seems to only admit
domination and subordination as a kind of zero-
sum geography’ (Allen, 2011b, 295). In particu-
lar, it has been shown here how an ‘expediency of
political action, the practice of manipulating
wills at arm’s length or the mobilization of
responsibilities and obligations orchestrated at a
distance, for instance, lend themselves to more
mutable, crosscutting arrangements of power’
(Allen and Cochrane, 2010; Allen, 2011a; 2011b,
294; 2012). There are roles for lobbyists and
community groups as well as formal institutional
actors in raising and mobilising political
demands, but material things and relationships
are also important in constituting such assem-
blages.
In the unfolding legal geographies of narcotics
production, there are alternative worlds yet to be
imagined. Their nomospheric re-spatialisation
and re-signification will also demand
performative enactments that challenge the pre-
vailing and privileged legal encodings of society
and space, but it is apparent that intensive,
material differences can emerge in variously
distanciated and mediated ways. Hence the intra-
actions amongst such seemingly incongruous
places as Australia, Afghanistan, the USA, and
Turkey are key to the making and remaking of
the various, worldly landscapes of narcotics pro-
duction. As this paper has demonstrated, their
legal geographies render present various power-
ful actors and forces that reach out beyond as
well as recede back inside the traditionally
scaled, hierarchical territorialisations of law.
© 2013 The Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to two anonymous referees for helpful com-
ments, one of whom inspired me to render my nomospheric
interpretation more topological. Assistance with fieldwork
was provided by Indra Boss and Andrew Harwood. I also
thank the IAG legal geography study group for its support in
various forms.
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