Williams 2013 GR

Licit Narcotics Production in Australia: LegalGeographies Nomospheric and Topological

STEWART WILLIAMSUniversity of Tasmania, School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania,Private Bag 78, Hobart, Tas. 7001, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Received 3 February 2013; Revised 26 April 2013; Accepted 16 May 2013

AbstractLicit narcotics production in Australia is based on the cultivation of a poppy croprestricted to Tasmania under local, national, and international regulation. Itslegal geographical analysis is advanced by drawing on the thinking about ‘thenomosphere’ and ‘topology’ developed by David Delaney and John Allen, respec-tively. Australia continues to lead global production of licit narcotics as distinctnew entities, relationships, and capacities have been enabled by differentiatingbetween the constituent alkaloids morphine and thebaine with a loophole identi-fied in US legislation of the 80/20 rule. Nomospheric and topological lenses areused to focus on the intensive, emergent qualities of the industry in addition to thetraditional topography revealed in its scalar, networked territorialisation. Arenewed understanding of the spatial workings and power plays relevant caninform possible transformation around narcotics production.

KEY WORDS legal geography; narcotics; nomosphere; poppy; Tasmania;topology

IntroductionHumans have cultivated opium poppy (Papaversomniferum) over the millennia for fuel, food,and fodder, but the plant is especially prized forits opiate or narcotic alkaloid content. Australia’scommercial cultivation and processing of poppywas established following trials in the 1960s.Despite some fluctuations, it has since continuedto account for up to half of all licit narcotic rawmaterials produced in the world each year(Wood, 1988; Williams, 2010). This Australianindustry 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 criticalpresence in regulating production.

Distinctly situated in space and law, the Aus-tralian poppy industry is analysed here with amixed methods approach providing the richempirical description deemed so critical in legalgeography. For as Holder and Harrison (2003, 3)

state: ‘Context is everything.’ The spatial work-ings and power plays shaping this global industryare then explored with reference to DavidDelaney’s and John Allen’s ‘nomospheric’ and‘topological’ theorisations, respectively.

The paper comprises three sections. First, thelegal geography framework is explained with ref-erence to conceptual work based on notions ofthe nomosphere and topology. Second, the pro-duction of narcotic raw material in Australia isexamined as it has been constituted in thetraditional topography of scalar, networkedterritorialisation and in the more intensive land-scape of emergent relations. Third, the findingsand their implications are discussed in light ofnomospheric and topological theorisations.

Legal geography, the nomosphere,and topologyOver the last two decades (at least) a significantbody of scholarship has emerged at the intersec-

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364 Geographical Research • November 2013 • 51(4):364–374doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12025

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tion of law and geography. Theoretical interestsand empirical concerns in the legal and geo-graphic disciplines were initially combinedthrough an interpretative turn (Blomley andClark, 1990). As Clark (1986) once argued, thelaw is practised in specific environments as amanifestation of structural power that permitslocal agency, and Pue (1990) likewise notes theparticularity of place alongside law’s generalabstractions. More recently, Delaney (2003)describes legal geography in terms of word andworld. He follows Sarat in observing how law ‘isall over’ and geography ‘is everywhere’ such thatthere is an endless array of legal geographieswith ‘an infinitely rich field of instantiations andcombinations at every scale from the micro-corporeal to the extra-planetary’ (Delaney, 2003,67).

Legal geography scholars have identifiednumerous entities, issues, and settings in whichlaw and space are seen to intersect. They includestate legislation influencing access to naturalresources, employment, education, housing orhealth services; the distinctions made betweenpublic and private space in relation to suchdiverse things as gardening and sexuality; thezoning or enclosure of spaces as they range fromindividuals’ bodies and homes through to work-places and institutions including hospitals andprisons; and the holding, sharing, and sale orexchange of rights and responsibilities in realproperty, natural commodities, and the globalcommons (see, for example, Blomley et al.,2001; Holder and Harrison, 2003; Blomley,2004).

David Delaney’s nomosphereIn legal geographical scholarship, space isincreasingly imagined not as an inert surface onwhich law is inscribed or enacted. Rather, theworld is seen as being constantly and activelyconstituted in spatial and legal terms through thematerial stuff of things as much as the relation-ships amongst them (Delaney, 2001; 2003; 2010;Whatmore, 2002; 2003; Blomley, 2007). Boththe materiality of the world and our relationshipswith it are caught up in the workings of power(capable both of having power effects and ofbeing affected by it).

For Delaney (2010) political power insinuatesour world as a ‘nomosphere’ – a term coined tocapture the material and performative as well assymbolic and imaginary aspects to the unfoldingof society through space and law. It thus com-prises ‘nomoscapes’ constructed in ‘nomospheric

projects’ that he describes as hegemonic,counter-hegemonic, or situated somewherebetween these two poles. His neologisms evincea Schmittian theorisation with familiar implica-tions. Such projects are imbricated in the exer-cise of power in constituting and reconstitutingthe world in terms of its legal geographies. Theyare therefore still seen to be conceived andenacted

. . . in order to affect and justify exclusions,separations and confinements in order toenhance control, domination, exploitation andmarginalisation of others, or the comfort ordiscretion of those who benefit by prospective(prescriptive) transformations. The very ideais to affect the situational distribution ofpower. (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 entailone another as the perquisites of power andauthority. The former functions by ‘drawing,redrawing or relocating boundaries, lines, thresh-olds (diminishment); giving these new materialforms (a wall goes, a barbed-wire fence comesdown, a check-point is set up or abandoned)’to reconfigure nomoscapes; the latter does soby modifying relationships ‘within a settingor . . . between settings – access, exclusion,expulsion, confinement, invasion etc (the purifi-cation of public space, the invention of criminalprotection orders, or safety plans, the crafting ofexceptions to the Fourth Amendment warrantrequirement)’ often along nomospheric lines ofpublic/private, domestic/foreign, or similar dis-tinction (Delaney, 2010, 150). Third, transforma-tion can be effected through ‘novel – oftentransgressive – 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 asunusual.

This nomospheric work has extended ourthinking in legal geography. Notably, it figuresthe entanglements of human and non-humanmaterial relations constituted in space and law.It also endeavours to resist territorialism’s‘container-like “spaces” that impose a rigidin/out; either/or structure to the world’ (Delaney,2010, 90). However, it does then return to a moretraditional, topographic power geometry. Dyna-mism and change are important for Delaneybut driven primarily by human actors engaging

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© 2013 The AuthorGeographical Research © 2013 Institute of Australian Geographers

with the state’s control over a jurisdiction, forexample, or the division of land into individual,cadastral parcels. Another perspective, one that ismore explicitly topological than territorial, there-fore proves useful here.

John Allen’s topologyWork by Allen and colleagues on the twists andturns of state power understood in terms of topol-ogy starts from the premise that nationalterritorialisations are no longer sufficient ‘tomake sense of a state whose powers have beendispersed, decentred and fragmented’ (Allen andCochrane, 2010, 1071). It does not address lawper se but the interest in state power and politicsprovides a valuable entry point to consider someof the latest thinking about issues of scale andterritory that are otherwise little explored in legalgeography.

Allen, along with scholars such as Agnew,Brenner, Elden, Jessop, Jones, and Marsden(as well as his own co-authors), seesreconfigurations as necessary to how we thinkabout state, territory, and sovereignty. It is mostapparent in our current context of globalisationthat there is no definite inside or outside to thesupposedly pre-given spatial containers of insti-tutionalised power. Various other private andnon-government players such as security firms,commercial regulators, and environmental agen-cies are also now recognised for their key roles inoperating alongside the state. Traditional hierar-chies of territorialisation and movements ofpower either upwards or downwards have givenway generally to a flattening of scale and to whatare described in work by Allen (2011a; 2012) asmore than relational geographies of assemblage.

Despite the efforts to better explain today’smulti-centric landscapes through rescaling, Allen(2012, 192) suggests that we are still left with ‘arather passive geography where the mix of space/times embedded in the entanglement of distrib-uted entities largely fails to register’. His worktherefore has a strong resonance with Delaney’swork on nomospherics. Indeed, Allen similarlywants to capture some of the unusual and evencontradictory as well as contingent dynamics ofworld-making. For example, Allen (2011a, 154)is interested in assemblage thinking as it admits‘the possibility that heterogeneous elements canhold together without actually forming a coher-ent whole.’ So, with others he critiques the logicof containment in biosecurity’s ‘fixed diseasegeometry’ 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 empiricaldescription but counters it with the benefits ofstrong spatial conceptualisation. Therefore,while he focuses on the world’s constitution as itemerges through the relationships amongstthings (as does Delaney), he also draws on themathematical notion of topology, revealing howthe 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-Euclideanlandscape of topology is one that ‘disrupts oursense of what is near and what is far by looseningdefined 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 holdtogether without actually forming coherentwholes is arguably attributable to a geographyof 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 ourgeographic imagination. His point ‘is not thatterritory or scale have been superseded or ren-dered obsolete’ (2011b, 286). Rather, he exploreswhat a topological perspective can add to ourunderstanding of how power gets practised.Allen’s insights therefore resonate well withDelaney’s nomospheric thinking. Together theycan inform legal geographical analysis in criti-cally new and sophisticated ways as demon-strated here with narcotics production.

Analysing the spatio-legal constitution ofAustralian narcotics productionThe Australian poppy industry was established asa new commercial venture in the island state ofTasmania in the 1960s and 1970s. Opium poppyhad been grown on the Australian mainlandduring the Second World War but only as awartime measure for the emergency productionof biodiesel from the seed. The industry in itsnew form, with focus on processing opiate ornarcotic alkaloid content for pharmaceuticalmanufacturing, has entered a different realm andspecifically one of drug regulation with attendantgeopolitics (Williams, 2010; Evered, 2011a).

366 Geographical Research • November 2013 • 51(4):364–374


After the Second World War a decision wasmade by pharmaceuticals manufacturers basedin Britain to extend beyond the northern hemi-sphere their production of narcotics for use inanalgesia. Major international companies estab-lished the industry in Australia, starting with asubsidiary of Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline orGSK) soon followed by Tasmanian Alkaloids(owned by Johnson & Johnson). They haverecently been joined by a third (much smaller,local) firm named TPI Enterprises. Their suc-cesses have built on competitive advantages thatrange from the suitability of soils and climatethrough to the island’s small population andisolated location. Ongoing development relieson state and industry working together to makesignificant investments with high-tech inputs,but regulatory requirements also have to bemet.

Analysis of the Australian poppy industry’slegal geography used mixed methods to generateand examine qualitative and quantitative data.Production details are intentionally not wellpublicised for such a sensitive and closely con-trolled crop but the UN does make availableannual statistics. Textual data were obtainedfrom the publications of various regulatory agen-cies and from a concurrent research project ledby the author examining developments in thisAustralian industry. In-depth, semi-structuredinterviews of up to two hours’ duration were con-ducted in 2012 with 15 key informants from stateagencies in agricultural production, extension,justice, and policing or private firms in farming,processing, transport, and infrastructure. Theinterviews were audio-recorded and transcribedfor content analysis. Other data are drawnfrom the author’s field notes and photo-documentation.

A familiar geometry of scalar territorialisationRestricting the Australian poppy industry to Tas-mania was decided amongst all state and territorygovernments with a Commonwealth agreementsigned in 1971. It is administered by the Tasma-nian state government’s Department of Justice(DoJ) under the Poisons Act (Tas) 1971. A localstatutory body, the Poppy Advisory and ControlBoard (PACB), licenses farmers who have beenvetted through police checks and hold contractswith one or more of the state’s three poppy pro-cessors to grow poppy in accordance with legalrequirements. The number of licenses to beissued and the areas of poppy to be cultivated arenegotiated each year between state and federal

governments and the INCB to reflect desiredoutputs and production levels.

Data on poppy cultivation and processing ofraw narcotic materials are reported by Australiaeach year to the UN. Like all other nations thatare signatories to the UN Single Convention onNarcotic Drugs 1961, Australia provides annualdata on imports, exports, and expected require-ments of narcotics. These data are used ‘forcontrol purposes and to meet the needs ofresearchers, enterprises and the general public’and ‘inform Governments of the limits withinwhich international trade in and manufacture ofnarcotic drugs may be conducted during a givenyear’ (INCB, 2011, 3). All but nine of the world’snations 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 scalarterritorialisation evinced as the countries thatproduce narcotics are authorised (or not) tooperate under their own legislation as well as UNregulations. At present there are six majorproducers of licit narcotics including traditionalgrowers India and Turkey. Recent arrivals Aus-tralia, France, and Spain are described as newproducers together with the longer establishedproducer Hungary. All use modern industrialmethods in harvesting and processing the crop asdry poppy straw except for India, which stillmanufactures opium from latex scraped by handand collected off the green poppy heads. Whilethey all are licensed to export raw narcoticmaterials, Australia leads world production eventhough the industry is based in a small, sub-national state. As an employee of GSK correctlypoints out:

All of GSK’s poppy production is based herein Tasmania, at this stage. We produce about25% of the world’s legal opiate or narcoticmaterial. Our friends at Johnson & Johnsonup the road produce approximately the other25% of it. So half of the world’s legal opiateis coming out of Tasmania at the moment(Participant 5).

In contrast to the work of the INCB is thatundertaken by the UN Office on Drugs andCrime (UNODC). It operates in the managementof what has become a global drugs problem. Itslatest 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).



The UNODC identifies six nations as the mainones producing illicit narcotics. The traditionalproducers Afghanistan and Pakistan are respon-sible for most of the output from the regionknown as the golden crescent (in South-westAsia) whereas the Lao People’s DemocraticRepublic and Myanmar are significant in theregion known as the golden triangle (in South-east Asia). With the emergence of illegal narcot-ics production in Latin America where it wasonce absent, Colombia and Mexico are nowadding opium to coca production. While all six ofthese nations are signatories to the UN SingleConvention, unregulated poppy cultivation andprocessing occur on a large scale inside (andacross) their borders, which prohibits them fromproviding narcotics to the world on a legal basis.

In this landscape, bounded spatial units arevariously connected or disconnected along linesof distinction, for example, as licit or not. Like-wise, their extension in space is subject to thehierarchical, scalar effects of institutional author-ity. For example, Australian output peaked in2002 as ‘a result of strong world demand plus anattempt by the manufacturers to build safe rawmaterial stock levels’ (DoJ, 2003, 66). In themid-2000s, it was ‘reduced significantly . . . inreaction to world oversupply’ (DoJ 2007, 50).Australian output has since been allowed to

recover, reaching unprecedented levels from2010 onwards (Tables 1 and 2). Measured interms of both hectares of poppy cultivated andtonnes of alkaloid equivalent produced, the highlevels of output in 2010 were not only more orless sustained in 2011 but significantly surpassedin 2012, the latest year available for such data(INCB, 2011; DoJ, 2012).

Efficiencies are situated with industry playersin the form of high-tech investments and are thusfound alongside the comparative advantages ofsoil and climate that get fixed all-too-simply inspace. The Australian industry’s location in whatis deemed ‘the safest area in the world’ (Partici-pant 3) likewise garners critically importantinternational support. Tasmania’s island geogra-phy offers the industry insularity and isolation,affording a sense of security, yet it boasts globalconnectedness, aligned with transnational firmsand supranational agencies while distanced fromproduction elsewhere that is illicit and inefficient(Williams, 2010). Indeed, some interference anddiversion, albeit minimal, does occur each yearin Australian production (DoJ, 2011, 2012).

Contingencies and inconsistencies appearelsewhere too. For example, poppy cultivation inTurkey has variously been legal and illegal. Itwas 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 cultivationAustralia 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 300Hungary 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 746Turkey 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 414Illicit cultivation

Afghanistan 131 000 104 000 165 000 193 000 157 000 123 000 123 000 131 000Colombia 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 100Mexico 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 600Pakistan 1 500 2 438 1 545 1 701 1 909 1 779 1 721 362Other 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 countriesproducing small quantities for domestic use. Total illicit cultivation in 2011 exceeds the sum of individual figures as it includesan estimate of 14 341 hectares for Latin America (including Colombia and Mexico) otherwise not shown. Source: INCB (2008;2011) and UNODC (2012).



war on drugs, though Turkish farmers growpoppy 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 isestimated 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 topologicalapproaches in its analysis.

An emergent, intensive landscapeThe extensive topography of containment andexclusion noted above is not fixed but prone to

slippages and movement. It is marked throughthe ongoing inscription of legal and spatialboundaries yet the fences encountered securingfarm paddocks and processing factories in Tas-mania (Figures 1, 2, and 3) are quite open andporous. In similar fashion, Hinchcliffe et al.(2012, 2) discuss ‘the disease geometry thattends to conceptualise healthy life and disease asseparate spaces, with biosecurity understood as apractice of demarcating and shoring up border-lines’ that they critique in terms of the limits tothis 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 inhectares).

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Poppy rich in morphineEstimated area sown 7 400 6 700 4 900 4 982 5 250 10 506 12 770 14 050Actual area harvested 6 644 6 599 3 457 4 661 4 108 4 598 9 127 12 157

Poppy rich in thebaineEstimated area sown 6 800 6 500 5 300 3 872 9 700 11 857 11 650 13 580Actual area harvested 5 578 4 633 4 839 3 837 7 807 8 894 10 922 11 343

Poppy total (morphine and thebaine)Estimated area sown 14 200 13 200 10 200 8 854 14 950 22 363 24 420 27 630Actual area harvested 12 222 11 232 8 296 8 498 11 915 13 492 20 049 23 500

Note: Figures for 2011 are based on advance data as submitted by the Government to the INCB. Figures for areas cultivated withmorphine-rich poppy from 2010 to 2011 include cultivation of an opium poppy rich in codeine. It was estimated that 800 hectareswould be cultivated with 613 hectares then sown, and 580 hectares harvested in 2010. The estimate for cultivation in 2011 is 360hectares 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).



into the power over life, and undermine its verypossibility.’

With poppy, those growers and processorssubmitting to regulation are controlled rightdown to the level of the plant’s active ingredientswhere significant differences pertain. In thisemergent, intensive landscape possibilities areopened up as well as closed down in the differentrelationships and outcomes arising throughencounters with the industry’s living, biologicalplant material. The alkaloids contained in opium

and poppy straw and the latter’s semi-processedform (concentrate of poppy straw) include mor-phine, codeine, thebaine, noscapine, oripavine,papaverine, and narceine. They occur at differentpoints in the plant’s chemical pathways andappear in industrial production processes asstarter materials and intermediate or end prod-ucts. Only some are subject to regulation:

Morphine and codeine are under internationalcontrol because of their potential for abuse,

Figure 2 Tasmanian Alkaloids factory, Westbury (photograph by author).

Figure 3 GlaxoSmithKline factory, Latrobe (photograph by author).



while thebaine and oripavine are under suchcontrol because of their convertibility intoopioids subject to abuse. Noscapine, papaver-ine and narceine are not under internationalcontrol. (INCB, 2011, 50)

Of these alkaloids, the Australian industryhas had a longstanding focus on morphine andcodeine, but it has shifted recently with invest-ments in research and the development of pro-duction pathways using other alkaloids suchas thebaine. The increased sophistication ofplant breeding, horticultural practices, and pro-cessing have all found synergies with thegrowth in international demand for pharmaceu-ticals such as oxycodone. Subsequently, in Tas-mania the cultivation and processing of newpoppy strains rich in thebaine has boomed andrecently superseded that of morphine poppy(Table 2).

Illicit production around the world relies onthe traditional manufacture of opium, but mostlicit production uses modern industrial processesto extract specific alkaloids. As the official sta-tistics most recently recorded:

About 88 per cent of the morphine and 96 percent of the thebaine manufactured worldwidewere obtained from poppy straw, while theremainder was extracted from opium. Aus-tralia, France, Spain and Turkey continued tobe the main producer countries in 2010,together accounting for about 95 per cent ofglobal production of poppy straw rich in mor-phine. Australia, France and Spain were theonly producers of poppy straw rich inthebaine in 2010. India remained the sole licitsupplier of opium to the world market.(INCB, 2011, 73)

The Australian industry’s domination of theglobal production of raw narcotic materials isassociated with increases in both its areas undercultivation and efficiencies in processing. Inaddition to the farmers and processors seeking tomaximise the crops planted and overseen bythem and the PACB, the farmers are paid onassay and so compete amongst themselves toproduce the ‘top crop’ in any one year for thefirm to which they are contracted. Alkaloidcontent has continued to rise sharply of late inthebaine and morphine poppy. A Tasmanianindustry representative explained, in 2000:

. . . we were getting 10 kilograms per hectareof alkaloid content out. In 2010, we weregetting 20 kilograms per hectare of alkaloid

content. That’s now at 25 kilograms perhectare and we are now reaching top crop, notaverage, our top crop for the last 2 years withTasmanian Alkaloids have been getting 73kilograms per hectare . . . Glaxo, their topcrop in morphine did 73 kilograms as well,which is huge . . . Our competitors throughoutthe world wouldn’t be doing 10 kilograms, ifless, they are doing less in most instances(Participant 3).

The presence of thebaine has been key to theindustry’s ongoing success. Manufacture andtrade in this alkaloid occurs in a form ofthebaine-rich concentrate of poppy straw. Glob-ally, production started in 1998 and has risensteadily to peak at 197 tons in 2010 (the latestyear for which data is available) of which 88%was produced by Australia; a total of 148 tonswas 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. In1979, UN Resolution 471 called on importingcountries to support traditional suppliers of nar-cotic raw materials and to limit imports from newproducers. Its intention in regulating global pro-duction has always been to ensure a legitimatemarket for materials that might otherwise enterthe illicit drug trade. The resolution wasreaffirmed by the UN in 1981. The US Depart-ment of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administra-tion (DEA) subsequently passed the Code ofFederal Regulations, Section 1312.13 Issuanceof import permit. The 80/20 rule is a central partof 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 narcoticraw material imported into the United Statesshall have as its original source Turkey andIndia. Except under conditions of insufficientsupplies of narcotic raw materials, not morethan twenty (20) percent of the narcotic rawmaterial imported into the United Statesannually shall have as its source Spain,France, Poland, Hungary and Australia.(DEA, n.d.)

Since 1981, it has been amended andredesignated several times (including in 2006,for example, to replace the former Yugoslaviawith Spain as a source country).



The rule has been resisted in Australia as theUSA is 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 poppygrowers lobbied the Congress, the JudiciarySub-committee on Crime. We went there in1991 to lobby them against this 80/20 rulebecause the dynamics of the world werechanging and we were increasing productiv-ity, and we had a secure environment, and sothey were going to progressively reduce the80/20 rule at about 5% a year. We stayed therefor five weeks while this was going to happen.The major pharmaceutical companies, theopium based pharmaceutical companies andthe Turkish and Indian Governments, theylobbied harder than what we did, and as wewere on the plane home we got the word tosay: ‘She’s all over, rover . . . it is still inplace; 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. Thequanta of opium, poppy straw, and concentrate ofpoppy straw permissibly imported into the USAare assessed on morphine content alone. TheAustralian industry has therefore grown byinvesting in the cultivation and processing ofpoppy rich in thebaine. Tasmania’s state govern-ment was recently able to report:

The DEA has reviewed the method in whichthe ‘80/20’ rule is calculated. Based on thereview, DEA has concluded that it will con-tinue the methodology currently utilised. Thedecision is very important for the future of theindustry, and represents a considerable benefitto the State (DoJ, 2009, 56).

Discussion: how law and space can makeworlds of differenceThe production of licit narcotics in Australia isconstituted in complex ways. In ‘instances of thematerialization of the legal’ it appears ‘the legalis also materialized through the various modes ofspatialization’ (Delaney, 2010, 22). The world asnomosphere arises in a multiplicity of legal geog-raphies that are continuously being re-spatialisedand re-signified. For example, the UN regulatespoppy cultivation and processing defined as legalor illegal in territorial terms that are relativelyfixed and contained but not wholly so. For licitnarcotics production the UN’s high-level nego-

tiations mostly involve a handful of countries,including Australia, but connect with transna-tional pharmaceuticals companies and otherplayers such as state governments and localfarmers. Its multi-scalar terrain can be imaginedin a topological analysis as a ‘flattened land-scape’ in which

. . . the things that circulate across ever greaterdistances can be tracked, associations can betraced, and connections mapped in a conven-tional cartographic manner. There is a familiartopography to all this movement and exten-sion that would not be out of place in anyconventional mapping of flat surfaces charac-terized by measured distances and well-defined proximities (Allen, 2011b, 288–289).

Also, there are intensive relations and points ofemergence where entanglements of the humanand nonhuman have powerful effects. Thesuccess of the Australian industry as one of theworld’s main suppliers of licit narcotic rawmaterials has involved the relatively safe andsecure as well as highly efficient production ofalkaloids from the island state of Tasmania. Yetthe enfolding of society and space links it to theUS legislation of the 80/20 rule that has subse-quently been reworked in Tasmania to presentnovel opportunities for the Australian poppyindustry. Differentiation of thebaine from mor-phine has proven critical in exploiting a gap thathas been retained in the rule’s methods of calcu-lation. Still, such regulation is always subject tochange, and is therefore closely watched bystakeholders.

In the spatial workings and power plays of thisglobal industry, institutional authorities, govern-ment agencies, private firms, and others havebeen brought into ‘more or less direct presencethrough mediated and distanciated forms ofreach’ (Allen and Cochrane, 2010, 1082). Also,with a legacy stretching out (and reaching in)from more than three decades ago, the 80/20 ruledraws attention to the temporal as well as spatialtwists and turns in this topology:

What happens elsewhere, in far-off places,and what is drawn from the past to make thepresent possible, are all part of the topologicalequation, where presence does not have to belocal, nor part of the same moment or timeperiod, to be a link in a newly formednetworked arrangement (Allen, 2011b, 288).

The legal geographies of narcotics productionare highly contingent as well as dynamic and



susceptible to slippage. In bringing together allsorts of peoples, places and practices, theco-constitution of licit and illicit worlds reachesinto the future as well as the past. Delaney’sconclusions on the spatial and legal pragmaticsof world-making are insightful:

The overwhelming bulk of world-makinghappens elsewhere. The point is to draw atten-tion to the contingency of the worlds so madeand to the alternative worlds imagined but(provisionally) foreclosed, and to alternativeworlds still to be imagined and (no less provi-sionally) constructed. (Delaney, 2010, 194–5)

Following Allen and Delaney, a nomosphericand topological reading of the legal geographiesof narcotics production might further engage thelandscapes of possibility onto which it opens.Australia and Afghanistan, for example, arecounterpoised in terms of the legality (or not) ofnarcotics production but are also of interestperhaps as they rank, respectively, among theworld’s most affluent and most impoverishednations. For illicit production, globally, the areaunder poppy increased from 191 000 hectares in2010 to 207 000 hectares in 2011 with Afghani-stan responsible for 63% of all cultivation(UNODC, 2012, 26–7). Of a potential 7000 tonsof opium manufactured there in 2011, one half isestimated to have been consumed or trafficked asraw opium; the other processed into approxi-mately 467 tons of heroin (UNODC, 2012, 26).Conversely, even with the global production oflicit 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 poppycultivation and processing in Afghanistan arehighly inefficient in contrast to those in Australia,they underpin rural livelihoods there. For thegrowing seasons between 2002/03 and 2005/06,the value of opium exported each year has rangedfrom over 60% down to 38% of Afghanistan’sgross 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 andcommunity-based efforts either to facilitate orresist Afghanistan’s possible move into licit nar-cotics production, but looking to effect changeprimarily ‘from above’ via legislation. It simi-larly discusses the licensing of production inAustralia and national competition, but it

remains focused on the territorial state as the keyplayer. Tasmania’s state government is, however,holding an inquiry right now into the vexedmatter of perhaps importing Turkish poppy intoAustralia to be processed. Notably, the interna-tional machinations and debate at state level arebeing driven by local political concerns: ‘TheTasmanian Government has given in principlesupport for poppy processor TPI Industries toimport raw poppy straw from Turkey to make upa shortfall. Poppy growers are opposed to themove and say poppies processed in Tasmaniashould be grown in Tasmania’ (Dakis, 2013).Such developments in this legal geography pointup the constant need for its ever more nuancedinterpretation.

ConclusionThe notion of topology permits complex, emer-gent configurations to be understood where topo-graphy’s ‘spatial geometry seems to only admitdomination and subordination as a kind of zero-sum geography’ (Allen, 2011b, 295). In particu-lar, it has been shown here how an ‘expediency ofpolitical action, the practice of manipulatingwills at arm’s length or the mobilization ofresponsibilities and obligations orchestrated at adistance, for instance, lend themselves to moremutable, crosscutting arrangements of power’(Allen and Cochrane, 2010; Allen, 2011a; 2011b,294; 2012). There are roles for lobbyists andcommunity groups as well as formal institutionalactors in raising and mobilising politicaldemands, but material things and relationshipsare also important in constituting such assem-blages.

In the unfolding legal geographies of narcoticsproduction, there are alternative worlds yet to beimagined. Their nomospheric re-spatialisationand re-signification will also demandperformative enactments that challenge the pre-vailing and privileged legal encodings of societyand space, but it is apparent that intensive,material differences can emerge in variouslydistanciated and mediated ways. Hence the intra-actions amongst such seemingly incongruousplaces as Australia, Afghanistan, the USA, andTurkey are key to the making and remaking ofthe various, worldly landscapes of narcotics pro-duction. As this paper has demonstrated, theirlegal geographies render present various power-ful actors and forces that reach out beyond aswell as recede back inside the traditionallyscaled, hierarchical territorialisations of law.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI am indebted to two anonymous referees for helpful com-ments, one of whom inspired me to render my nomosphericinterpretation more topological. Assistance with fieldworkwas provided by Indra Boss and Andrew Harwood. I alsothank the IAG legal geography study group for its support invarious forms.

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