God of dreams: from poppy to patient

Dedicating thousands of acres to farming flowers may not seem like an obvious investment for a healthcare company, but nature is an efficient manufacturer of some potent pain relievers.

The Australian island state of Tasmania is the starting point of one of our more unusual manufacturing activities – growing poppies.

From these acres of pink and white waving poppies, we ultimately produce about 25% of the world’s supply of opiate-based medicines for pain relief. And those tiny black seeds on the bun that you ate for lunch probably came from our poppy harvest too.

The poppy’s sap is the raw material that ultimately is turned into some of the active ingredients in OTC medicines like Solpadeine and cough mixtures.

From poppy to medicine cabinet

So what takes place for the poppy to become a medicine? It starts with about 500 growers on the remote Antipodean island, where conditions for growth are considered ideal.

The harvested crops – about 15,000 to 16,000 tonnes each year - undergo an initial processing step at our Latrobe site in northern Tasmania. This raw material is then shipped across the Bass Strait to our facility at Port Fairy in Victoria, Australia where codeine, morphine and thebaine are manufactured.

We ship the codeine phosphate to other sites where Panadeine and Solpadeine are made. The rest of the products are supplied to third-party customers in over 35 countries to produce a wide range of pain relief medicines.

The whole process is of course strictly controlled, with quality assurance and security given the highest levels of attention. Poppies are grown under licence in Tasmania and managed to a high level to ensure the highest quality and regular supply of opiate products comes out of the state.