The conviction of ten members of a cannabis-growing gang at Liverpool Crown Court this week revealed a prosperous agro-business. Until the law caught up with them, they were covertly growing the plant in rented houses in some of Cheshire’s most respectable neighbourhoods.

The law, of course, has not always taken such a dim view of domestic narcotic farming. Indeed, if some of the agricultural improvers of the late 18th century had got their way, England’s green and pleasant land would have been sown with fields of opium.

The white opium poppy grew naturally in the Fenland ditches of Cambridgeshire. There, migraine sufferers claimed that what really hit the spot was a nice cup of poppy-head tea. But while there might have been enough wild growing poppies to satiate the thirst of labourers in the Fens, only mass cultivation across the country could deliver the quantities necessary to feed the drug habits of the nation.

Before Aspirin came to the market in 1899, it was opiates that commonly provided pain-relief. Despite the Opium wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, China was actually only a very minor supplier to Britain. Overwhelmingly, the drug was imported from the Ottoman Empire.

Yet, as early as the 1790s, the idea had taken hold that, rather than pay the Turks for their opium, there was good money to be made from growing the stuff at home. Poppies, like turnips, could even be useful additions to crop rotation, producing higher yields for British agriculture.

John Ball, a Somerset farmer, was among those who reported a good harvest. The Royal Society of Arts gave him 50 guineas to help to develop his opium crop. Ball pointed out that since child labour could be used to cut the poppy capsules and collect the juice, “the expense will be found exceedingly trifling”.

Using the same argument, it was not long before opium was touted as the solution to Ireland’s economic ills. Poppies, it was suggested, could displace the Emerald Isle’s dangerous over-dependence on the potato.

As ought to have been obvious, opium production is not really suited to cold, wet climates. Irish opium never took off. Not that this stopped enterprising Scots from trying, with an Edinburgh surgeon named John Young rewarded for his cultivation of a crop supposedly better adapted to the northern climate — lettuce opium.

Buckinghamshire proved to be the best-suited country for opium cultivation. Yet, by the time the first restrictions on the drug’s use were imposed by the 1868 Pharmacy Act, Britain’s farmers had all but given up competing with Turkish imports. The climate had proved too changeable, and “marauding hares” repeatedly decimating the crop. To think that Beatrix Potter thought it was the lettuce that made the Flopsy Bunnies soporific . . .

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