The Poppy Is Also a Flower (1966 TV Movie)

Grace Kelly: Self - Narrator

Quotes 

• [first lines] 

  Grace Kelly - Self : [to the camera as she holds a poppy flower]  The poppy has no smell... not even the smell of evil. It's just a... an ordinary flower: bright, innocent looking. And yet, there are many, many people who would have to be convinced - and it would take some convincing - that the poppy is also a flower, for to them the poppy is the source of the only pleasures that are left to them... the sickening, deadening pleasures of drug taking, drugs like heroin, cocaine, morphine that are the refined products of the opium, which the seeds of this poppy can produce. All from this simple, innocent flower. The sickness, not a particularly new one, but a sickness that is spreading day by day, nearly every country in the world, and what is truly serious and really tragic, a sickness that is spreading amongst the young people all around us... but all from this simple flower. The problem of drug taking, of drug addiction, is one that nobody can avoid, from which nobody can turn away, because it is has become a part of the life all around us, and forgive me if I say it again of the young lives that are growing up with us. But as it's not yet too late, as there still is time, people all over the world are anxious to help, starting, well, right from where it should start, with the United Nations, where the producing countries are trying to combine in the controlling of the opium poppy itself in its growth. Today, in the story that we are going to tell you, we're trying to show how the United Nations and individual nations work to stamp out this evil. Starting in our story, the only country that has voluntarily abolished all growing of the poppy fields or opium harvesting, at a great financial loss to themselves, but these are people who are trying to set a lead for others to follow: the people of Iran.