Stoned Wallabies Make Crop Circles

It's the tripnaut! writes "The BBC reports that Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around 'as high as a kite', a government official has said. 'The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,' says Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania. 'Then they crash,' she added."

Comments

Who hops around on opium?

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has smoked a lot of opium in northern Afghanistan and the High Pamirs, I just have to ask: why are these wallabies hopping around? Opium is about the most soporific drug I could think of.

Re:Who hops around on opium?

[Jurily]

Obviously, the government official was high too.

Re:Who hops around on opium?

[Chris Burke]

Who hops around on opium?

Marsupials. Duh.

But seriously, it could easily have a different effect on a different species. I don't know what effect a wallaby's naturally occurring endorphins have on them... maybe the sense of euphoria makes them excited and jumpy instead of lazy?

Re:Who hops around on opium?

[gardyloo]

It might be the same as the effects of catnip in humans (a mild sedative) vs. on cats (usually not a sedative).

Re:Who hops around on opium?

[robthebloke]

Try hopping in a straight line on it....

Re:Who hops around on opium?

[amicusNYCL]

except that Morphine is produced from the Milk of the poppy, which can be directly ingested in the case of a Wallaby eating a poppy, it would be similar to a human eating 80mg of pure Morphine Sulphate, i.e pretty strong.

No, it would be similar to a human eating one or two poppies.

Re:Who hops around on opium?

[DirtyCanuck]

It would not be similar, do to the manufacturing process needed to convert poppy resin into usable heroin. As outlined below:

"If you're keen you CAN make use of them. I have references which list young plants 10-20cm high as having up to 71mg/100g dry weight of alkaloids. This can seem insignificant until you consider that opium is only about 12% alkaloids, and you can end up with a kilo of thinnings or more in your home garden. I estimate a couple of grams of smokeable opium type extract can be extracted using methanol. And given that thinnings usually appear prior to flowering commencing, why would you waste a chance?
On the other hand you CAN drop the thinnings into hot water and allow to steep for 10 minutes, which produces a vile tasting tea. Opium tea, in my humble opinion, is fucked. It tastes horrible, needs fresh flowers to be halfway potent, and does not store well. All alkaloids are apparently present in such a tea in roughly equal proportion to that which occurs in crude opium, but this improves the taste not one whit. Potency varies with opium tea: you can drink a glass and feel nothing, or drink a glass and discover in half an hour that you've had too much. Smoking O is a more immediate route and allows for better dose control. Smokeable O is also easier to store and has a long shelf life.
The alkaloids in Papaver somniferum are present in the plant their pure form, and are combined with so called vegetable acids. Combined with acids, alkaloids tend to be more soluble than the free bases. An early method for the extraction of morphine involved addition of calcium chloride to the filtrate of opium 'soup'. The calcium would precipitate the calcium salt of these vegetable acids as a sort of soap scum leaving a crude morphine hydrochloride.
Opium varies in alkaloidal content from batch to batch, and between regions. The British Pharmacoepia 1954 lists Yugoslavian opium as the most potent at 15-17% alkaloid content, followed by opium from Turkey, Iran, and Indian opium was at the bottom of the list with a 9-10.5% alkaloid content. pium is the name for the brown waxy exudation from the unripe seed capsules of Papaver somniferum. Opium is a combination of chemicals, not a chemical name in itself, as someone so rightly pointed out in Usenet recently. It's active ingredients are morphine, thebaine, codeine, papaverine and several others besides. Yield and proportions of opiates vary between individual plants, crops, varieties, areas. Other parts of the poppy plant (stems, leaves) produce a latex which dries and resembles opium, but the quality of the latexes from the other parts of the plant are not near as high.
Opium is described as a stimulant narcotic. Historically it has been prescribed as a painkiller, for inflammation unaccompanied by dyspnoea, in typhus, typhoid and smallpox etc.

You can purify opium further into its constituent alkaloids- then take the morphine and turn it into smack if you so desire. Wouldn't bother really, opium is a much more pleasant experience overall than heroin. And the skills you'd require are well out of the range of those described"

Re:Who hops around on opium?

[spandex_panda]

Obviously, the government official was high too.

Dude. I am from Tasmania (no there are no spinning devils, its out of season) and you are absolutely right. The whole Goverment is high.

Hrm

[Niris]

This makes that show Rocko's Modern Life make a LOT more sense.

Re:Hrm

[GundamFan]

I'm sorry about this but I have to respond to your sig:

Sex is like pizza: even when it's bad it's still pizza.

If there animals are getting high

[BigHungryJoe]

then is the desire to alter your consciousness with drugs a naturally occurring one? Does the drug war make sense anymore?

And why the hell didn't I give marijuana a try when I was in college? What the hell was I so scared of? Of course, now I'm old, and I don't have access to pot, so I can't try it.

Re:If there animals are getting high

[Chris Burke]

is the desire to alter your consciousness with drugs a naturally occurring one?

Ever seen a cat around catnip? Lemme put it this way: The question you're asking doesn't occur to them, they just know they love catnip.

And why the hell didn't I give marijuana a try when I was in college?

I hear ya man, especially since where I went to college it was about as close to legal as you can get in the States. When the penalty is a ticket less severe than for double parking, how much enforcement do you think there would be? But nooooo, I had to actually study and be a good student in college...

Re:If there animals are getting high

[rthille]

Dude, you want pot, move to CA, get your medical marijuana card and go to town.

Re:If there animals are getting high

[vorpal22]

There are huge numbers of examples of animals consuming intoxicants in nature:

* Hummingbirds will drink the sap of daturas and brugmansias, which contain deleriant tropanes, inducing extremely potent hallucinations.

* India has problems with elephants and alcohol. Elephants will consume fruit that has fermented, and then, in their state of intoxication, cause massive amounts of damage to towns and power lines.

* Most amusingly (to me), my aunt has a farm, and every night the ducks are corralled in the barn. Every morning when she goes to let them out, they're quacking and pressed up against the door. An explosion of ducks happens when she finally lets them free, and apparently they race for a shady patch across the field and fight viciously over there. She could not figure out why this was the case, so after hearing that cattle were frequently in that area, I suggested she check the cow dung for mushrooms. Sure enough, those ducks were bolting out to fight over a morning dose of magic mushrooms.

Re:If there animals are getting high

[vorpal22]

Incidentally, if you are still interested in forms of intoxication other than alcohol (which is fun but not particularly interesting and comes with a hefty price in the form of a hangover), there are plenty of options at your disposal. Some worth investigating:

* The mescaline containing San Pedro cactus, which is a fantastic hallucinogen, IMO. Long (10-12 hours), but very fun even at low doses. I found it quite mood enhancing and stimulating, and would consume 10 grams and then proceed to clean my entire house. As I despise cleaning, this was a great way to get to those chores I detest and put off perpetually like dusting, washing walls, etc. Even the mundane becomes quite intriguing. Best purchased dried if you intend to use it for recreational experimentation, although a lovely plant in its own right.

* The salvinorin containing Salvia divinorum (a variety of sage called Diviner's sage), a very potent hallucinogen that can be bought online through lots of distributors. Extremely powerful, but very short lived.

* Amanita muscaria (the red mushrooms with white spots on the caps, also another hallucinogen). As I haven't tried it, I can't really comment on this one other to say that it's out there.

* Dextromethorphan, a dissociative anaesthetic in the same family as ketamine and quite the opposite of a traditional hallucinogen in terms of effect. At low doses, it is frequently described as a combination of alcohol, marijuana, and caffeine with extremely mild hallucinogenic effects (walls may breathe, things may seem mildly lilliputian). At high doses it is incredibly bizarre and induces phenomena like out of body experiences, astral projection, ego annihilation, etc. Really cool stuff, and available at any pharmacy without a prescription, although the product through which it is consumed does make some uneasy due to negative stigma.

* Nitrous oxide (laughing gas) in the form of whippets is regularly available, although depending on your area, purchase with intent to consume may be illegal. Delightful drug, which in particular mixes well with others. Gets a bad rap because it is an inhalant, but it is *not* a solvent and does not cause the brain damage associated with solvents. Well worth trying.

* Kava, the root of the Piper methysticum tree (a variety of pepper), usually consumed as a beverage. It has been extremely popular in the South Pacific for centuries and is drank in ways similar to North American alcohol consumption. It is a sedative-hypnotic and functions very similarly to benzodiazepines (Valium, Ativan, Xanax, Klonopin and friends) but is nonaddictive. It can be ordered from Hawaii, where it is also consumed, by various suppliers. I have had fantastic, very fast service (even to Canada) with http://www.realkava.com/ and was extremely impressed with the product. This stuff is fairly mild, great and worth exploring: I would drink a few cups and then spend the night working on my creative writing. Note that there were some concerns several years ago about people experiencing liver failure after regularly consuming kava in pill forms, but the current hypothesis regarding this is that pharmaceutical companies, in an effort to curb costs, were using stems and leaves of Piper methysticum (as opposed to just roots), which contain hepatoxins. The indigenous people of the South Pacific have no recorded cases of liver damage, although they are smart enough to stick to the root of the tree.

While some of the major players in the legal drug world, those are but a sample of what is at your disposal. Some options are definitely best avoided (nutmeg and daturas, for example). The above should be fairly safe and readily available to most, although your mileage may vary on both accounts. I have tried all but the amanitas with good success, and would recommend them all.

Pot is, in my opinion, a miserable drug, but I'm one of those few people for which it is extremely hallucinogenic (not in a good way) and anxiety inducing. I also suspect th

Re:If there animals are getting high

[geekoid]

I didn't smoke because I wanted to maintain my memory.
Now that I am over 40, it turns out I'm loosing my memory anyways.

Re:If there animals are getting high

[TapeCutter]

I'm 50 and have smoked for 35yrs now, short term memory is screwed when stoned but when straight I don't seem to have any more "senior moments" than other non-smokers my age.

Wrong site?

[adosch]

Was this suppose to be a post on 'The Onion' ? Maybe an editor was 'high' and posted on the wrong site...

Why do I get this scary image.........

[Anonymous Coward]

of Pauly Shore in a Kangaroo suit?

Where's the picture of the circles?

[DigitalReverend]

Screw having a picture of the animal, I want to see the crop circles.

Next on Fox: When Animals get High

[spun]

I wouldn't call it a natural desire, because the animals aren't born with it. But most every animal that has experienced consciousness alteration wants more of it. Birds eat fermented fruits and berries and get so drunk they can't fly. Most dogs love beer. Many pets like the effects of marijuana. But my all time favorite drunken animal story is the one about the derailed corn train and the drunken bears. A trainload of corn derailed in the Rockies, where cleanup was next to impossible. After the corn fermented, bears would come from miles around to eat the fermented corn, and get so drunk they'd pass out on the tracks. So the railroad company buried the corn. And the bears dug it up. The company sprayed it with nasty tasting stuff. The bears didn't care. Finally, they covered it in diesel fuel and burned it. The bears ate what was left.

Re:Next on Fox: When Animals get High

[mikiN]

Animals are beautiful people.

Re:Next on Fox: When Animals get High

[Chris Burke]

Jeebus. I would not want to be the guy tasked with taking away the bears' booze.

Here's the facts...

[WeirdJohn]

There is a problem with wallabies eating poppy crops in Tasmania. The real story is that the plants are very immature and there is no alkaloid in them. There are circular patches being made in the crops, but this is due to the normal feeding behaviour of wallabies and not because they are bouncing around in circles stoned. No wallabies are falling to the ground stoned. The farmers are setting up patches of preferred feed plants outside the poppy fields to prevent it happening in the future, as Tasmania is one of the leading exporters of opium for medical use, and they want to diminish the impact on revenue.