India, May 1 -- India grows more legal opium than any other country. Nearly a million licensed farmers, mostly in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, coax the latex out from poppy capsules by scoring them by hand. This then ends up as morphine for pain relief in hospitals worldwide, though rarely in India's own. Fewer than 3% of Indian cancer patients have access to adequate pain medication, in a country where cancer detection tends to be late, and palliative care is often the only care that can realistically be offered.

Meanwhile, India has three times the global average prevalence of illicit opiate consumption. In Punjab, drug-related offences rates under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act are nearly 33 per 100,000 peo...