In the middle of a yellow and deserted plain, five heads emerge from an ocean of white poppies. From a distance, the scene could evoke a painting by Monet. Up close, the reality is less bucolic. We are not far from the village of Ajofrín, in the province of Toledo, in Castile-La Mancha, and these two women and three men have penetrated, through a hole in a gate, into an abandoned property invaded by the sleeping poppy.
“We are three friends, we came from France to harvest poppy, like many people who come from elsewhere in Europe”, explains Justin, 34. The other two are from Barcelona. It is not the delicate white flowers that interest them, but the blood of the plant, its sap – so much so that they are nicknamed the “vampires of opium”.
If Justin is holding two sticks of ice cream, it’s not because he treated himself to a refreshing treat under the hot sun of this Tuesday afternoon. A small razor blade is fixed between the two bâ, which allows him to incise the poppy capsules so that they exude their latex: it is opium, a highly addictive substance which puts you to sleep and calms the pain thanks to certain of its molecules, primarily morphine – a sort of poor man’s heroin.
In 2009, a tool similar to the one cobbled together by Justin was found next to the body of Pasquale, a 32-year-old Italian who died of asphyxiation after convulsions, on a legal poppy plantation in the province of Albacete ( Castile-La Mancha), where he had entered to consume. Three years ago, a 20-year-old Irishman, Ryan, died in similar conditions in Polán (province of Toledo), only a few kilometers from the field where Justin and his friends are harvesting on this day of may.
Global opium giant
Spain is the world’s largest producer of opium and poppy straw [la capsule, sans les graines, et tout ou partie de la tige] for therapeutic use. It produces the equivalent of 113 tons of morphine per year, far ahead of France and Australia (75 tons each), Turkey (69 tons) and India (27 tons), according to United Nations figures.
Alcaliber, a private company, has been since 1986 the only one approved by the Ministry of Health to manage poppy crops in Spain and manufacture pharmaceutical products derived from opium, essential in the hospital management of pain. Founded fifty years ago, Alcaliber is linked to the family of Juan Abelló, a Madrid businessman now aged 80, seventh of the richest people in Spain with an estimated fortune of 2.9 billion euros. euros, according to the magazine Forbes.
The “poppy king”, a close friend of Juan Carlos
This man, who inherited the pharmaceutical empire created by his father in the aftermath of the Civil War, has long been a hunting partner of King Juan Carlos – every year it was up to which of the two men would kill the deer with the larger woods. According to the manager of a large property in Castile-La Mancha where they took place, these hunting parties were also an opportunity to organize and distribute Alcaliber’s activities. The company delivered the seeds and collected the harvest. The large landowners made land available. All these little people were winners: the sleeping poppy and its opium bring in much more than chickpeas, peas or cereals. In 2018, the Abellós sold Alcaliber to the British investment fund GHO for 69 million euros.
The location of the 528 legal poppy crops is kept secret but, in the spring, it is impossible to hide the oceans of white flowers that are the 11,000 hectares planted with white poppy in Spain, according to figures from the Ministry of Health. A destination now popular with consumers and traffickers, who come from all over the world this season, in search of what the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called the “flower of sloth”, “the flower of laziness”.
The banks of the Tagus, in particular, are very popular, as confirmed by a 24-year-old young man from Cadiz (And