Word: somniferum
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These opium poppies grow in Turkey. They are not your ordinary Papaver somniferum, but a new strain developed over eleven years by a Soviet scientist from Armenia. Infuriated by his government's decision to end the better-poppy-for-socialism program (his aim was to produce a more potent drug for medical use), Dr. Krikor Grotrian makes a deal to sell the seeds to an Armenian dealer, who smuggles them into Turkey. There, largely because they bear scarlet blooms rather than the more common white petals of opium flowers, they flourish undetected in the hinterland. What Grotrian does not realize...
...flow begins with the white-to-purple-flowered opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, an annual plant grown as a cash crop in Turkey, Mexico and the "golden triangle" of Southeast Asia: the northern portions of Burma, Thailand and Laos. The U.S. is putting heavy pressure on Turkey to end legal poppy growing, so far without much success. Raw opium is converted into so-called morphine base; much of the U.S. supply is refined into heroin at simple clandestine laboratories in southern France. It has come into the U.S. concealed in the toilets of international jets, in cans carrying Spanish fish labels...
...hardly seems a fit place for man. Yet that inhospitable area has attracted as motley an assortment of tribesmen, fugitives, thieves, freebooters and smugglers as exists anywhere on earth. They come and they stay on for only one reason: be cause of certain distinctions of climate and soil, Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, finds the place unusually congenial. Each spring the hillsides blossom into white and purple waves of flowers. The annual harvest produces 1,000 tons of raw opium - 90% of the world's supply...
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