They are the cute and cuddly cousins of the kangaroo, but are Australian wallabies becoming the Cheech and Chong of the marsupial world?

Wallabies in Tasmania — the island off the south coast of Australia — have been accused of hopping into the state’s hundreds of commercial poppy fields, getting “high as a kite”, and then stumbling around forming “crop circles” in the paddocks.

In an amusing exchange during a parliamentary Budget estimates committee in Hobart on Wednesday, the Tasmanian Attorney-General, Lara Giddings, was addressing security issues at the state’s poppy plantations when she made the drug accusations against the island’s wallabies.

“The one interesting bit I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting high as a kite and going around in circles,” Ms Giddings told the committee.

“Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”

Her spokesman yesterday played down the comments as the Attorney-General “making a joke” with her colleagues. However poppy growers have admitted the native wildlife are fond of jumping the fence and eating the opium-laden poppy heads.

Rick Rockliff, the field operations manager for Tasmanian Alkaloids, one of the largest producers of poppy seeds and other products, said it is not a common occurrence, but is well-known among the farmers.

“It is certainly something people have noticed but it’s not that common,” Mr Rockliff told The Times.

“Some of the extensive growing areas are close to large areas of bush, so occasionally if the bush wildlife are short of a feed they might go into the field.”

Mr Rockliff said he had not personally seen a wallaby in the poppy field. “But I have seen a wild deer in the middle of a harvest that appeared to be acting strangely,” he said. “It was not as scared of a human as it would normal be and was acting a lot slower.”

Mr Rockliff said in previous years farmers were known to send their sheep and other livestock in to graze on the “stubble paddocks” to help clean up after the harvester had been through it.

“In the process of that, if there was any rain, which for some reason seems to activate the effect of the poppies, sometimes that would affect the sheep and they would all follow each other around in large circles,” he said.

“But it’s a practice we discourage now from our farmers.”

Mr Rockliff added that the hallucinogenic effect of the plant could have lasted up to 12 hours, “but it has no long-term effects on the wildlife or anybody else”.

Tasmania is the world’s largest producer of legally grown opium alkaloids for the international pharmaceutical market. Poppy fields take up about 20,000 hectares of the island, and the industry is one of the largest employers in the state.

There are about 500 farms which supply approximately 50 per cent of the raw material for morphine and other opiate drugs.

Tasmanian Alkaloids removes alkaloids from the poppy plant to produce two types of a product they describe as a "concentrate of poppy straw". One has morphine — which is converted into codeine — as its main component, and the other has thebaine, which is converted into a range of strong analgesics.

According to the Mercury newspaper in Hobart, there have been 17 thefts resulting in 2,280 poppy heads being stolen throughout the last financial year. Mr Rockliff said the figures were relatively low and were not a cause for concern. “The Tasmanian poppy industry is the most secure poppy industry in the world,” he said. “We have the occasional tourist who come in and steals a couple of poppy heads but that’s all, we never have any major problems.”

Wild-eyed

— Vervet monkeys on St Kitts got a taste for alcohol from fermenting sugar cane

— Sheep in the Shetland Islands wandered into traffic in 1998 after eating hallucinogenic “magic mushrooms”

— Elephants trampled six people to death in 2002 after drinking rice beer in Assam, India

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