Friday Fuckwit

Tonight it's one side of our coat of arms, the famous boxing marsupial that gets the coveted monika of Friday Fuckwit . . .

Happy hops damage poppy crops . . .

Wallabies breaking into poppy farms in search of food are getting more than they bargain for.

The mystery of crop circles which have appeared from time to time in and around Tasmania's legal opium poppy fields may have been solved. It seems it is not aliens, but junkie wallabies hopping around in dazed circles!

Poppies are grown in Tasmania for morphine, manufactured by pharmaceutical companies all over the world but it appears humans are not the only ones who have discovered that the poppies contain narcotics.

Recently retired farmer Lyndley Chopping spent more than 30 years growing poppies and he has seen wallabies acting strangely in his fields. "They would just come and eat some poppies and they would go away. They'd come back again and they would do their circle work in the paddock," he said. "They seem to know when they've had enough (unlike the average addict). They'll still be around and they would leave them alone.

But the state's largest poppy producer, Tasmanian Alkaloids, has noticed a pattern in the wallabies' behaviour. Rick Rockliff, the company's field operations manager stated, "Often other forms of food are in short supply in late January/February and poppy capsules, half their weight is actually seed which is very nutritious. It's a seed you see on bread rolls and in bread mixtures and things like that."

"But in the process of eating open the capsule it's quite possible they do ingest a little bit of the capsule material that does contain the alkaloids and this can have some short-term effect. "They are, after all, a narcotic and ingested in big amounts, can have an effect."

there are doubts however that the stoned kangas are becoming addicted. They appear to be free of the predictable digestive problems that would accompany such an addiction. They seem to like their drugs in moderation.

At least it might stop the bouncy bastards from drinking our beer! And . . .what about introducing mobs of kangaroos into Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle . . .problem solved!