Tasmania learns the dangers of wallabies getting high

Opium farmers in the Australian state of Tasmania are learning the dangers of leaving their product out in the open:

Wallabies eating in Tasmania’s legally grown opium poppy fields are getting “high as a kite” and hopping around in circles, trampling the crops, a state official said.

Tasmania’s attorney-general, Lara Giddings, told a budget hearing yesterday that she had recently read about the marsupials’ antics in a brief on the state’s large poppy industry. Tasmania is the world’s largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.

“We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” the Mercury newspaper quoted Giddings as telling the hearing. “Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”

Whether the UN wants to treat the problem as an illness or a crime is at this point unknown. 

monkeyc.net/Flickr