Foreign Correspondent: April 5

Tomorrow night on Foreign Correspondent, Liam Cochrane travels to Myanmar, the source of most of Australia’s heroin,where poppy production has more than doubled in a decade.

But what will it take to stop the opium trade?

When I look around the field, to me it looks so beautiful – Nang, young mother and opium poppy grower, Myanmar

Nang has never tried opium. She has only the vaguest idea that the alluring flowers she tends so carefully do any harm to anybody, or that what she does is technically illegal. As she sees it, opium is the only crop that puts food on her table and keeps her child in school.

What else can I do? It’s made my life better – Nang

Nang’s is just one of about 200,000 families that the UN says are involved in poppy cultivation across Myanmar, the world’s second biggest opium producer. Production has more than doubled in recent years

We are talking about tonnes and tonnes of heroin. I think most Australians would probably think it’s coming from Afghanistan, but it’s not true. It’s actually from Myanmar – UN official in Yangon

South East Asia Correspondent Liam Cochrane ventures into the remote Myanmar valleys that produce most of Australia’s heroin. He then takes the trail to the China border where the bulk of the processed heroin heads to the outside world.

But as Cochrane discovers, not all the heroin is sold abroad. Pure, cheap and plentiful, the drug is scything through Myanmar’s townships.

My sons were washed away on a tide of heroin – Daw Lie, grieving mother, Nant Phar Kar town

In Nant Phar Kar the pastor reveals that he has buried 336 drug users from his congregation. By his reckoning, close to half the townspeople use heroin. He fears for his town’s very survival.

Nant Phar Kar symbolises an entire country’s addiction to the poppy. Opium money helped bankroll six decades of civil war. It has underpinned much of Myanmar’s economic development and has fed corruption even as the country makes its painful transition to a fledgling democracy.

No one really expects Myanmar’s new government to raze the poppy fields. But after a series of failed attempts to coax poppy farmers into trying other crops, hopes are rising that the newest UN experiment might finally succeed.

9.30pm Tuesday April 5 on ABC.