Cannabis Chronicles

We’re not sure if other’s would consider it a “vacation” or not, but due to a variety of circumstances beyond our control, our online presence will likely be pretty scarce for at least a few weeks.  We’ll be taking a break from writing, and hoping to have a few moments to smell the roses.

The one year anniversary of the creation of the 3LB’s Cannabis Chronicles will likely come and go while we are away.  We first purchased our domain etc. in late July last year.  After couple of short weeks to familiarize ourselves with the software, we started inviting our friends to our humble little blog.  The rest is recorded in the various posts and pages here.

All of our various feathered friends will remain in our heads and hearts during our hiatus.  We may be able to infrequently check PM’s at TCC for those who want to keep in touch.

Gun control opponents are often quoted as saying, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” It’s their way of saying that lacking a firearm, there are still plenty of ways that an angry individual can harm another with fatal intent and results.

With that in mind, every time we see a death in the drug war, we see it as another needless act in an unwinnable war. The relative toxicity of marijuana is so low, as to make it virtually impossible for an individual in ingest a fatal dose. With that in mind, there’s no escaping a very simple conclusion . . .

Marijuana Doesn’t Kill People - The War on Drugs Kills People.

Man killed, 2 flee in Saratoga pot farm raid
Steve Rubenstein, SF Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, July 11, 2008

(07-10) 19:11 PDT Saratoga — One armed man was shot and killed and two others escaped on foot into the brush during a raid early Thursday on a marijuana patch in the hills south of Saratoga, a Santa Clara County sheriff’s lieutenant said.

The shooting happened when five deputies and 15 other officers confronted the men at the patch around 7:30 a.m., Lt. Ed Wise said.

It was not immediately known if the men fired at officers or how many shots were fired, or by whom, Wise said.

“The deputies started to enter a large marijuana garden and encountered three subjects armed with guns,” Wise said. “During the encounter, shots were fired. One subject was shot and fatally wounded, and two others fled on foot.”

Two deputies were placed on routine administrative leave as officials launched an investigation into the incident, said Lt. Dalia Rodriguez, Santa Clara sheriff’s public information officer.

More than 100 law enforcement officers, including SWAT teams from several surrounding cities, were dispatched to search for the men.

At about 3 p.m., officers spotted two suspects running out of the dense brush at Peach Hill near Villa Montalvo, but the two men fled back into the dense woods after spotting officers.

Three canine units were deployed, including a bloodhound tracker as well as two helicopters.

The men were still at large Thursday evening.

The shooting took place near the intersection of Bohlman Road and Canon Drive, Wise said.

Deputies in full SWAT gear battled difficult terrain in extreme heat throughout the day searching for the suspects, Rodriguez said. It took responding officers 90 minutes to reach the site of the shooting and farm, where there were at least 10,000 pot plants growing, she added.

Deputies were assisted by SWAT team officers from the San Jose, Mountain View, Los Altos and Palo Alto police departments and the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office.

Local residents were urged to be careful while the suspects, described as armed and dangerous, remain at large. Police had only a vague description of them as Latinos in their early 20s. One man was wearing a blue shirt, blue pants and a red cap, and the other man wore a tan tank top.

The dead man was not immediately identified.

Rodriguez said crime scene investigators had not yet reached the site by late afternoon Thursday, and the coroner had not yet removed the body.

The raid was organized by the sheriff’s marijuana eradication team, along with narcotics officers from the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. That outfit, run by the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, is a task force of local, state and federal agencies that focuses on eradicating marijuana growing and trafficking in California.

Chronicle staff writer Jill Tucker contributed to this report.

Perhaps other’s may not see this story as do we, but we will mourn the death of a man who died a nameless, faceless, and undoubtedly terrifying death. It’s sad that anybody should die in a needless war.

As reported earlier this week in Time Magazine, based on a study published in the Public Library of Science, the residents of the the US had among the highest levels of use of all recreational/illicit drugs in the world. Here’s the story itself . . .

Friday, Jul. 11, 2008
An American Pastime: Smoking Pot
By Sarah N. Lynch

The Netherlands, with its permissive marijuana laws, may be known as the cannabis capital of the world. But a survey published this month in PLoS Medicine, a journal of the Public Library of Science, suggests that the Dutch don’t actually experiment with pot as much as one would expect. Despite tougher drug policies in this country, Americans were twice as likely to have tried marijuana than the Dutch, according to the survey. In fact, Americans were more likely to have tried marijuana or cocaine than people in any of the 16 other countries, including France, Spain, South Africa, Mexico and Colombia, that the survey covered.

Researchers found that 42% of people surveyed in the United States had tried marijuana at least once, and 16% had tried cocaine. About 20% of residents surveyed in the Netherlands, by contrast, reported having tried pot; in Asian countries, such as Japan and China, marijuana use was virtually “non-existent,” the study found. New Zealand was the only other country to claim roughly the same percentage of pot smokers as the U.S., but no other nation came close to the proportion of Americans who reported trying cocaine.

Why the high numbers? Jim Anthony, the chair of the department of epidemiology at Michigan State University and an author of the study, says U.S. drug habits have to do, in part, with the country’s affluence — many Americans can afford to spend income on recreational drugs. Another factor may be an increasing awareness that marijuana may be less toxic than other drugs, such as tobacco or alcohol. (However, the study also found that the United States is among the leading countries in the percentage of respondents who tried tobacco and alcohol). As for the popularity of cocaine, the reason may simply be the close proximity of South America, the world’s only coca plant producer. And, finally, Anthony notes, it’s a matter of culture: the U.S. is home to a huge baby boomer population that came of age when experimenting with drugs was a part of the social fabric. “It became a more mass population phenomenon during a period when there were a large number of young people who were in the process of creating a culture of their own,” Anthony says.

The survey also found that more Americans not only experimented with drugs, but also tended to try pot and cocaine for the first time at a younger age compared with people in other countries. Just over 20% of Americans reported trying pot by age 15 and nearly 3% had tried cocaine by the same age. Those percentages jumped to 54% and 16%, respectively, by age 21. That finding isn’t surprising, says Dr. Richard Schottenfeld, a professor of psychiatry and a drug expert at the Yale University School of Medicine, since peer influence has a significant impact on the prevalence of drug use. In the Netherlands, for example, there is a large, vocal and homogeneous conservative population that is staunchly opposed to marijuana, says Schottenfeld. And anti-drug activists have made recent attempts to tighten the country’s cannabis policies.

Yet experts say the findings of the new survey don’t fairly reflect the success or failure of any particular drug policy. The survey asked only whether people had ever tried drugs in their lifetime — it did not ask about habitual use. “For drug policy, what you look at is regular use,” says Tom Riley, a spokesman for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. “Somebody having tried pot in 1968 in college doesn’t really have much to do with what the current drug use picture in the United States is.”

Though current findings may not provide enough context to judge existing drug policy, Anthony says they do highlight some valid issues, especially since stringent laws don’t appear to impact whether kids experiment with drugs. “One of the questions raised by research of this type is whether Americans will want to continue supporting the incarceration of young people who use small amounts of marijuana,” Anthony says.

The ongoing study, which surveyed more than 85,000 people in 17 countries, is part of a larger project through the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health Survey Initiative. Anthony says further research about the frequency of worldwide drug use, and new data from additional countries will be released in the future.

We didn’t see Canada included in that particular study, but we remember a similar report from within the last 6 months reporting a finding that Canadians consume the most Cannabis (per capita) in the world. Apparently the US may have the over-all lead, but doesn’t make a clean sweep in the “Drug Use Olympics”.

In an earlier posting here at the Cannabis Chronicles called Roundup Woes, we detailed a bit of the economic problem agrochemicals giant Monsanto is having with the production of it’s leading herbicide. While further researching Fusarium fungus for our recent series of journal entries called Fusarium Attack, we discovered another significant problem with the powerful plant killer, there is actually an association between the use of Roundup / glyphosate and increasing levels of the potentially plant deadly Fusarium fungus.

Here’s a version of the story from CropChoice.com . . .

Scientists link GM crop weed killer to powerful fungus

(Friday, Aug. 22, 2003 — CropChoice news) — South-North Development Monitor:

Washington, 20 Aug (IPS/Jeremy Bigwood) — Scientists are expressing alarm after finding elevated amounts of potentially toxic fungal moulds in food crops sprayed with a common weed killer widely used with genetically engineered (GE) plants.

Roundup, produced by food-industry giant Monsanto, contains a chemical called glyphosate that researchers are blaming for increased amounts of fusarium head blight, a fungus of often very toxic moulds that occurs naturally in soils and occasionally invades crops, but is usually held in check by other microbes.

If true, the allegations could not only call into question the world’s number one weed killer, but they also jeopardise global acceptance of Monsanto’s flagship line of genetically engineered Roundup Ready crops, which are themselves unaffected by the Roundup weed killer, which kills all competing plants, such as weeds, in the same area.

Monsanto has been producing a series of GE Roundup Ready seed stock for various crops, including cotton, soybean, wheat and corn, to be used exclusively with their successful glyphosate weed killer Roundup.

But because they are genetically engineered, the crops have not found easy acceptance in many countries outside the US, and they are still banned in Europe.

A four-year study found that wheat treated with glyphosate appeared to have higher levels of fusarium than wheat fields where no glyphosate had been applied, said Myriam Fernandez of the Semi-arid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre in Swift Current, in Canada’s Saskatchewan province. “We have not finished analysing the four years of data yet or written up the study,” she added in a recent interview with IPS.

While Fernandez’ research recently made headlines throughout Canada, it was not the first to discuss the relationship between glyphosate-containing weed killers and increased levels of potentially toxic fungi, but it was the first to report on the possibility of potentially toxic damage in wheat and barley, two of Canada’s most important crops.

A Monsanto spokesman was critical of the findings.

“It appears to be that Dr. Fernandez did a field survey looking at levels of Fusarium and then the factors that might be related,” Harvey Glick, head of the company’s scientific affairs division, told IPS. “So, from what I can gather, that was not a cause and effect. It’s just that they saw in the study area some fields that had higher levels of fusarium, for whatever reason, and then they looked at a list of factors that might be related and one of them there was Roundup used in those fields the previous year.”

Over the last two decades, several scientists from New Zealand to Africa have noticed and investigated the glyphosate-fusarium relationship through small-scale experiments in the relative obscurity of their labs and reported the results in academic journals.

The result of all of this work is almost 50 scientific papers, says Robert Kremer, a soil scientist at the University of Missouri. Overall, they describe an increase in fusarium or other microbes after the application of glyphosate.

Kremer’s ongoing research deals with the glyphosate-fusarium relationship on soybeans, including a Roundup Ready variety. His experiments with Roundup Ready and regular soybeans revealed that glyphosate seems to stimulate fusarium in the plants’ roots to such a degree that he considers the elevation of fusarium levels to be glyphosate’s secondary effect.

While Kremer found enhanced fusarium colonies in the roots of the plants, which could potentially reduce the harvest, he did not find them in the harvested soybeans themselves. But he said that he still worries that fusarium could accumulate in the soil at such levels so as to produce an epidemic that would move from field to field throughout a wide area. He also noted: “We didn’t see enhancement of fusarium when other herbicides were used” without Roundup. But according to contracts, farmers planting Roundup Ready crops must use Roundup weed killer exclusively or in combination with other chemicals.

Monsanto’s Glick rejected Kremer’s suggestions. “Roundup is almost 30 years old, and scientists have been looking at all aspects of its use for at least that long. So there is a tremendous amount of information available.”

“And that is why there is such a high level of confidence that the use of Roundup, based on all of this earlier work, does not have any negative impacts on soil microbes… And a lot of it has been published.”

In a recent article titled ‘GM Cotton Blamed for Disease’, Australia’s ‘Farm Weekly’ predicted that up to 90% of the country’s cotton belt could be inundated by a fusarium epidemic within the next decade due to Roundup Ready cotton. Fusarium contamination of cereals, such as the fusarium head blight (FHB) in wheat and barley that Fernandez is studying, has been responsible for serious crop losses.

About one-fifth of the wheat crop in Europe each year is lost to FHB, and in Michigan during 2002 it was estimated that 30-40% of crops were destroyed by the infestation.

When the mould passes into the food chain undetected, fusarium epidemics on cereals can have even worse impacts: such an epidemic was considered responsible for thousands of deaths in Russia during the 1940s, and in 2001 it caused a series of deadly birth defects among tortilla-eating Mexican-Americans in Brownsville, Texas, after the blight infiltrated corn. Minute amounts of fusarium continually enter commercial food products; it is at the higher levels that it can become a serious problem.

The fusarium fungus can produce a range of toxins that are not destroyed in the cooking process, such as vomitoxin, which as its name suggests, usually produces vomiting but not death. More lethal compounds include fumonisin, which can cause cancer and birth defects, and the very lethal chemical warfare agent fusariotoxin, more often referred to as T2 toxin.

During 2000, the US Congress planned to use fusarium as a biological control agent to kill coca crops in Colombia and another fungus to kill opium poppies in Afghanistan. Those plans were dropped by then-president Bill Clinton, who was concerned that the unilateral use of a biological agent would be perceived by the rest of the world as biological warfare. Andean nations, including Colombia, banned its use throughout the region.

According to Sanho Tree, director of the drug policy project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, “the US has supplied tens of thousands of gallons of Roundup to the Colombian government for use in aerial fumigation of coca crops.” That operation has “been using a fleet of crop dusters to dump unprecedented amounts of high-potency glyphosate over hundreds of thousands of acres in one of the most delicate and bio-diverse ecosystems in the world.”

But “this futile effort has done little to reduce the availability of cocaine on our streets, but now we are learning that a possible side-effect of this campaign could be the unleashing of a fusarium epidemic in the Amazon basin.”

Because of the glyphosate-fusarium link, Canada’s National Farmers Union is already opposing Monsanto’s application to introduce GE Roundup Ready wheat into the country. The federal government is expected to make its decision within months.

Here’s another article on the same topic from a different source, this time from the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) . . .

Round-up Ready Sudden Death Syndrome
Prof. Joe Cummins finds evidence that Roundup Ready causes sudden death and other diseases by boosting fusarium in the soil.
ISIS Press Release 30/11/03

For several years, scientists have investigated the impact of herbicides, particularly glyphosate (Round-up) on soil microbial communities. These investigations revealed increased colonization of the roots of Round-up Ready (RR) soya with the fungus Fusarium in midwestern fields during 1997 to 2000. At the same time, large scale cropping with herbicide-tolerant cultivars was found to increase soil-borne plant pathogens; Brazilian soils showed increased microbial activity for several seasons. There is clear evidence that repeated glyphosate applications over several seasons increases soil-borne pathogens.

During the first year of glyphosate application on RR soya, a severe sudden death syndrome epidemic occurred in several RR cultivars. The RR cultivars were susceptible to sudden death from infection by the fungus Fusarium solani. Sudden death syndrome of soya is a disease of economic importance in North America. Follow-up studies showed that different cultivars of soya showed different levels of resistance to the sudden death fungus and suggest that glyphosate tolerant and non-tolerant cultivars responded similarly to infection by Fusarium solani.

According to Jeremy Bigwood (www.mycoherbicide.net), a scientist from Agriculture Canada, Myriam Fernadez, had reported as yet unpublished studies showing that wheat fields that had been treated with glyphosate had elevated levels fusarium head blight, a serious disease of wheat.

Andy Coghlan of the New Scientist further reported:

“The potential problem was spotted a few years ago by Myriam Fernandez of the Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre run by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. She noticed that in some fields where glyphosate had been applied the previous year, wheat appeared to be worse affected by fusarium head blight - a devastating fungal disease that damages grain and turns it pink. In Europe alone, fusarium head blight destroys a fifth of wheat harvests. The fungi that cause the disease also produce toxins that can kill humans and animals. In a follow-up study, Fernandez measured levels of the blight in wheat fields. “We found higher levels of blight within each tillage category when glyphosate had been used in the previous year,” says her colleague Keith Hanson. And his lab study showed that Fusarium graminearum and F. avenaceum, the fungi that cause head blight, grow faster when glyphosate-based weedkillers are added to the nutrient medium.”

Unfortunately, Agriculture Canada has not fast tracked publication of such important results when they are advocating registration of RR wheat.

In conclusion, there seems to be a clear link between the use of herbicide and accumulation of pathogenic fungi in the soil. The RR soya cultivars fared poorly under the impact of the sudden death fungus. Wheat fields treated with Round-up appear to be sensitive to the head blight disease. Such findings should have triggered prompt and extensive reviews on the use of Roundup and Roundup tolerant GM crops by our North American regulators. Instead of which, the two governments of North America appear to be advocating registration of RR wheat.

As we learned in a previous entry (Deaf, Dumb and Blind), the Fusarium fungus has even adapted to attacking the human body.

As mankind seems slow to learn, the use of powerful chemicals in attempts to control insects or pests often has a large number of unintended and unfortunate consequences.

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring should be required reading for policy makers and land stewards alike.

As we mentioned in our last journal entry, as a scientist trained specifically in the field of fungus species like Fusarium, Jeremy Bigwood is uniquely qualified to speak against the ill considered development and use of biological herbicides in the War on Drugs. Here’s an article he penned for In These Times just two years ago . . .

June 6, 2006
Drug Warriors Push Eye-Eating Fungus
Why are members of Congress advocating the use of a dangerous crop-killer in Colombia?
By Jeremy Bigwood

An infection caused by Fusarium fungus destroys a human cornea

On April 16, the New York Times ran a full-page ad from contact lens producer Bausch and Lomb, announcing the recall of its “ReNu with MoistureLoc” rewetting solution, and warning the 30 million American wearers of soft contact lenses about Fusarium keratitis. This infection, first detected in Asia, has rapidly spread across the United States. It is caused by a mold-like fungus that can penetrate the cornea of soft contact lens wearers, causing redness and pain that can lead to blindness—requiring a corneal replacement.

That same week, the House of Representatives passed a provision to a bill requiring that the very same fungus be sprayed in “a major drug-producing country,” such as Colombia. The bill’s sponsor was Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) and its most vocal supporter was his colleague Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who has been promoting the fungus for almost a decade as key to winning the drug war.

The Colombian government has come out against it. And those entities of the U.S. government that have studied the use of Fusarium for more than 30 years don’t recommend it either: The Office of National Drug Control Policy, also known as the Drug Czar’s office, CIA, DEA, the State Department and the USDA have all concluded that the fungus is unsafe for humans and the environment.

“Fusarium species are capable of evolving rapidly. … Mutagenicity is by far the most disturbing factor in attempting to use a Fusarium species as a bioherbicide,” wrote David Struhs, then secretary of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, in a 1999 letter rejecting the use of the fungus against Florida’s outdoor marijuana crop. “It is difficult, if not impossible, to control the spread of Fusarium species.”

Mutation of the fungus allows it to attack other “hosts.” The eye-eating Fusarium seems to be a result of such a mutation. After all, the soft-contact lenses that it grows behind are a recent development—having only been commercially available since 1971.

The DEA stopped funding Fusarium research in the United States during the early ’90s after it learned that Fusarium infections can be deadly in “immunocompromised” people—not only AIDS patients and those with other illnesses, but also those who are severely malnourished. The University of the Andes in Bogotá has recently reported that 12 percent of Colombian children suffer from chronic malnutrition. Spraying this fungus on a vulnerable population could be perceived as using a biological weapon.

The CIA has been against the use of Fusarium to kill drug crops since at least 2000. At that time, one official told the Times, “I don’t support using a product on a bunch of Colombian peasants that you wouldn’t use against a bunch of rednecks growing marijuana in Kentucky.”

A top scientist from the USDA, which has studied the fungus the longest, said that his agency “cannot support” its use. And the State Department, whose Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement carries out drug crop eradication all over the world, does not support it, either.

In 2000, when Congress first passed “Plan Colombia,” the Colombian aid package that ordered the use of the fungus in Colombia, President Clinton waived the part of the bill that dealt with the fungus because he thought its use would be perceived as biological warfare. At the same time, the Andean Community of Nations, an organization comprising Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, banned it within their territories.

So, who does support the spraying of the eye-eating fungus over other countries? Only a few adamant drug war jihadists in the House, led by Burton, who are frustrated by the lack of progress in the drug war.

The fungus provision has already passed the House, but the Senate version of the bill contains no similar language. Responsibility for a final decision rests on the conference committee where the House and Senate bills will be reconciled—scheduled to happen before this summer.

As can be learned from the ongoing battle to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, something that’s a bad idea may end up defeated again and again, only to rear it’s ugly head once more in times of crisis. Just as happened historically in the case of alcohol prohibition, it time to wake up and realize this it not a winnable war.

The potential “collateral damage” from the deployment of Fusarium is absolutely and totally unacceptable. At it’s essence, the fungal bioherbicide has the potential to become a weapon of mass destruction, and it’s shameful that our leaders would even consider opening that Pandora’s box and unleashing their plant plague on unsuspecting persons in third world countries.

“Aye there’s the rub”, as they say. Our drug warriors have invested far too much in the drug war now to admit defeat, and find themselves in a position not unlike the Nazi’s of 1942-43. They are trapped in an unwinnable war, but because of the atrocites they have commited, they are too far gone to ever admit defeat.

After all, history teaches that it’s only the defeated who are ever tried for war crimes against humanity.

The earlier articles in our series on the use of Fusarium as a bio-herbicide in the drug war focused on the debate as it happened circa 1999-2002. This entry helps to bring the story more up to date, it comes from a website called the Narco News Bulletin which we discovered while researching “Plan Colombia” earlier this year . . .

Mycoherbicide Redux
U.S. Congressmen Declare Biological War on South America in New Antidrug Proposal
By Jeremy Bigwood
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

July 15, 2005

The Dr. Strangelove fringe of the drug warrior lobby is at it again. Dan Burton and Mark Souder, both Republican Bible Belt U.S. Congressmen from Indiana, are amending the drug czar office’s budget in an attempt to breathe Congressional life into a moribund Frankenstein’s monster scheme. They want to revive mycoherbicides (toxic fungi that kill plants) for use against drug crops. Even U.S. government drug enforcement officials have rejected the proposed mycoherbicides because of their toxicity to humans and the environment. Their use has also been banned throughout the Andes by the governments there.

The once-secret mycoherbicide program has a long history. The concept was first proposed during the 1970s and sounded like a good idea to naïve do-gooders and unschooled drug warriors. The government would develop a fungus that would only attack certain drug plants; it would be specific, and leave everything else healthy. It would kill the target marijuana, coca or poppy plants within a couple of weeks, but would linger in the soil and kill any successive plantings for several years. If none of the target plants were grown in the area where it had been applied, after a few years it would die off. The mycoherbicide “silver bullet” would banish illicit drug crops forever. All over the world. End of the drug problem for all time, they said…

Much of the original work was done secretly, mainly by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Energy (DoE)-contracted scientists. The clandestine work focused on multiple strains of two major species of fungi, Fusarium oxysporum for marijuana and coca, and Pleospora papaveracea for opium poppy. US scientists also made genetically modified versions of Pleospora – souping it up with genes from Fusarium.

Peruvian campesinos from the Huallaga Valley in Peru with malformed chocolate that they say was due to the Fusarium epidemic of coca that swept through the region from the early 1980s through the 1990s. The origin of the epidemic is still unclear but there are many who believe that it was a U.S. experiment and that it was either sprayed secretly or that it was sold to unwitting farmers as fertilizer or pest killer. Most professionals believe that it was “natural” and exacerbated by poor farming practices. Whatever the origin, most reports indicate that it also attacked other plants, from Lemongrass to staple foods, and contaminated the soil for long periods. Campesinos also complained of unexpected deaths of family members. U.S. State Department cables from Lima complained of entire communities having to leave their lands because nothing would grow on them after the epidemic hit.
Photo: Jeremy Bigwood D.R. 2000

But the devil, as always, is in the details: the fungus does not just grab the target plant and wrestle it to the ground; it doesn’t act mechanically, but chemically. The mycoherbicide fungus acts as a living micro-chemical factory, producing toxic compounds called mycotoxins that it itself is immune to. When the fungus encounters a target life form, such as a plant root, it secretes these mycotoxins, which dissolve the target’s cell walls. The fungus then ingests the liquefied contents of the target cell and reproduces itself, moving into the dead cell space as an uninvited and deadly guest. From there it produces more mycotoxins and repeats the process with adjacent cells until it has taken over a substantial area of the plant. Since the fungus usually attacks through the roots, the plant’s stem withers and the plant dries out and dies. Unlike chemical herbicides which are made in a factory, applied to plants, and then degrade (some more than others), mycoherbicides can be considered as living chemical factories, always ready to kill and stunt.

The cell-dissolving “mycotoxins” that are produced by the proposed mycoherbicides were initially discovered after hundreds of thousands of people died due to internal hemorrhaging after eating bread made from Fusarium-contaminated overwintered grain during the mid-1940s in the Soviet Union. Soviet scientists isolated and identified the responsible Fusarium, cultivated it, and extracted from it a new series of toxins that were named the “trichothecenes” toxins, one of which was given the pleasant moniker “vomitoxin.” During the Cold War these potent and chemically stable mycotoxins were “weaponized”; mass-produced and stockpiled by the major powers for use in chemical warfare.

Another trichothecene toxin, fumonisin, was in the news a couple of years ago because Hispanic mothers had been eating Fusarium-contaminated corn tortillas. This resulted in a rash of children born brainless and with other birth defects along the Rio Grande River. In order to safeguard their populations, government agencies all over the world, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), spend millions checking grains and corn to make sure that these fungi or the toxins they produce do not contaminate food supplies.

And the fungus doesn’t just attack plants. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had openly funded some of the early research on Fusarium and marijuana during the 1970s at the same time the CIA and DoE were funding clandestine work, but they pulled out after finding that the fungus itself could infect and kill mammals, including humans with deficient immune systems – such as people with bad colds or suffering from exhaustion.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the USDA took over and repeated much of the earlier clandestine research done by the CIA and DoE and took the work much further, developing various means of mass-producing spores, of storage, and media for application of the fungus. Other countries did similar work. The USDA also did the obvious research to see how host-specific these fungi really were. That research showed that the various strains to be used to kill coca or marijuana also killed non-target plants. In fact, the Fusarium mycoherbicide could infect and kill plants of unrelated genera. In the case of the anti-opium Pleospora mycoherbicide, it attacks several species of poppy, including the ornamental poppy that contains no opium and decorates millions of gardens worldwide. And it doesn’t make distinctions between poppy grown for legal uses and illicit poppy.

Some of the early Soviet research showed that it is not only the living fungal tissue or spores that can linger in the soil for years. The mycotoxins that the fungus secretes can outlast those living cells. Many of these mycotoxins do not dissolve in water or degrade rapidly, so they stay put and poison the soil for many years, stunting future plant growth or even rendering contaminated areas agriculturally dead for years.

A Peruvian campesino inspects coca killed by Fusarium. The Fusarium epidemic that ravaged the Huallaga valley of Peru was called “seca seca” by the locals because once the fungus choked off the roots of the plant, it would dry out and wither away.
Photo: Jeremy Bigwood D.R. 2000

In 1999, the newly appointed Florida drug czar decided to float the idea of using mycoherbicides against Florida’s outdoor pot growing industry. His idea was blocked by extremely stiff opposition – not from a Cannabis growers union, but from Florida’s own Department of Environmental Protection, which brought up another major problem: the mutation issue. Fungi can mutate and change hosts, especially Fusarium, and the species being proposed had a long history of causing epidemics in other plants. The more you massively apply a fungus, the more likely it is to mutate. Mycoherbicide deployment was rejected for Florida.

Also during the late 1990s, mycoherbicides were being proposed as part of Plan Colombia, the multibillion dollar US counterdrug/counterinsurgency (and now counterVenezuela) program. Perhaps, Congress thought, the Colombians would allow what U.S. citizens in Florida would not? (The U.S. Secretary of State at the time, Ms. Madeleine Albright, actually stated on the record that she was trying to apply mycoherbicides in Colombia under the cover of a United Nations program. The UN balked, saying that it didn’t want anything to do with this “American idea.”)

In 2000, there was growing criticism of the mycoherbicide plan, both in the United States and abroad, particularly in Latin America. An educational website, “Mycoherbicide.net” (now mycoherbicide.info) was created (by this author), detailing the criticisms of the program, and an alphabet soup of U.S. NGOs such as Earth Justice, the Amazon Alliance, the Colombian Human Rights Committee, the Institute for Policy Studies, the National Organization for the Repeal of the Marijuana Laws, the Latin America Working Group, the Washington Office on Latin America, and especially the Sunshine Project added to the chorus of the opposed. Outside the U.S., besides the U.N., many countries expressed open hostility to the idea and this was reflected in their press. In the case of Latin America, the U.S.’s desire to ram mycoherbicides down the throats of the Colombians was a major topic not only in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, but “downstream” in Brazil as well.

But Burton and his fellow drug warriors Hastert, Souder, Hyde, Rohrabacher, and the rest of the “mycoherbicide cheering committee,” continued to back the scheme and Plan Colombia passed in August, 2000. Then-President Clinton signed the legislation, but using some very muddy language, he “waived” – blocked – the use of mycoherbicides in Colombia. Why did Clinton stop the mycoherbicide plan? Because, months earlier, he had received a letter of warning from a Nobel Prize laureate he respected (and who confirmed this to the author but asked that his name be withheld). The Nobel prizewinner stated that the use of mycoherbicides – especially in a wartime situation such as that of Colombia (or now in Afghanistan) would constitute a unilateral U.S. entrance into biological warfare. In response to the letter, Clinton ordered a National Security Council meeting to review the issue. The result of the meeting – which was also interagency – confirmed the Nobel laureate’s apprehension. Clinton was not to go down in history as the U.S. President who brought biological warfare to a troubled world.

At the same time, a rebellion against mycoherbicides was brewing in “America’s backyard.” A week or so after the Clinton “waiver,” at a meeting of the governments of the Andean Community of Nations in Lima, representatives of the environmental entities (known by their Spanish initials “CAAAM”) of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela “rejected” the use of mycoherbicides in an agreement that banned Fusarium eradication throughout the Andes. Bolivia had already passed domestic legislation banning anything but manual drug crop eradication, and Peru and Ecuador followed suit with presidential edicts that banned chemical or biological eradication schemes.

By the end of 2000, the mycoherbicide program appeared to be dead, but behind the scenes, holdouts in the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) – an entity of the State Department – were still pushing the idea, as were some officials in the Drug Czar’s office (ONDCP). Some funding of research programs with Pleospora with an aim to eradicate poppy in Afghanistan was still going on in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, paid for by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and possibly with British and INL funding. A little later both UNODC and the British got cold feet and by the end of 2000, most of the U.S. government entities involved in eradication were also opposed. The USDA, the Department of Defense (DoD), DEA, EPA and CIA were all solidly against the idea.

In the State Department, things were also changing. For years, whole sections at the State Department, including ambassadors, entities that deal with the environment, as well as most of INL (especially those working in the field) had been opposed to it. But there were a couple of true believers, namely Rand Beers and Bobby Charles. But in 2003, Rand Beers, one of the mycoherbicide program’s stalwart supporters, left the State Department’s INL to work on the Kerry campaign (showing that Democrats have erred as much as Republicans on this issue). In 2005, Bobby Charles was removed when Dr. Rice took the reigns of power after he insulted the British allies’ inability to control the opium trade in Afghanistan. With the removal of Mr. Charles, there was no longer anyone at the State Department who was still promoting mycoherbicides.

By 2005, within the US government, only ONDCP appeared to still be supporting the use of mycoherbicides, but in reality the organization had already changed its position after hiring a resident scientist, but had not issued any statements to that effect. The change became obvious at a May 11, 2005 House International Relations Committee hearing when the pro-mycoherbicide Dan Burton asked the US Drug Czar, John Walters why the ONDCP wasn’t testing mycoherbicides. Here is the exchange:

Dan Burton: Well, why aren’t you testing it, then?

John Walters: Well, also because the controversy around mycoherbicides is such that it is likely to create an environment – when we already have an effective herbicide [Roundup] – concern about other agents being introduced to the environment. The Colombian government has also said that it is not interested. Again, it is not clear that this particular organism is specific to coca… If you were to drop [spray] it – and it is not specific to coca – it could cause considerable damage to the environment which in Colombia is very delicate. In order to start testing this [mycoherbicide] in an open area, it is suggested that one would be using it… Again, when you spray a foreign substance in areas where people are farming – in proximity to people and farm animals, you have to be sure it is safe. And you have to have, if you are going to do this in a democratic environment, you have to have the people’s confidence that it is safe…

Burton was clearly angered by this exchange, irrefutable evidence that all of the U.S. government had decided against mycoherbicides. Less than a month later he and his colleague Mark Souder of the mycoherbicide congressional cheering committee added an amendment to ONDCP’s Reauthorization Act to urge the study of mycoherbicides. According to the daily press bulletin of the Washington think tank Inter-American Dialog, “Burton’s amendment instructs the Director of the ONDCP to present Congress—within 90 days of the law’s enactment – a plan of action to [ensure] that an expedited, complete, and thorough peer review of the science of mycoherbicide as a means of illicit drug crop elimination is conducted by the appropriate government scientific research entity.’”

We can only hope for the unlikely – that Congress will come to its senses – or that, if the bill passes, the rest of the U.S. government and the scientists involved will be able to hold the line once again over the Congressional Dr. Strangeloves embarking on a dangerous course of biological warfare that will put the whole world at risk.

Jeremy Bigwood is a frequent contributor to Narco News and was a professor at both sessions of the School of Authentic Journalism. Before Bigwood worked in journalism, he published several peer-reviewed scientific papers in the mycological and chemical literature on fungal toxins. In 2000, he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Research and Writing Grant to study the U.S. government mycoherbicide program. Later that year he was the technical advisor to the Andean Community of nations meeting which banned the use of the Fusarium mycoherbicide throughout the Andean countries. He is based in Washington, D.C., and his work on mycoherbicides is presently funded through a TIDES grant.

The folks behind the Narco News Bulletin don’t pull any punches, their brand of journalism is usually hard hitting and factual. Not to mention that having a contributor, like Jeremy Bigwood, with expertise in fungal toxins is priceless. A big tip of our birdie wings to these folks who are fighting the good fight against the idiocy of the war on drugs.

The following take on the escalation of the drug war through the use of biological herbicides comes from CounterPunch, a bi-weekly muckraking newsletter with a radical attitude who advertises that: “Nothing makes us happier than when CounterPunch readers write in to say how useful they’ve found our newsletter in their battles against the war machine, big business and the rapers of nature.”

The Drug War According to Dr. Mengele
Agent Green Over the Andes
CounterPunch - December 24, 2002
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Hostile intentions toward the people of another country. Deployment of chemical weapons and biological agents. Pursuit of a scorched earth policy. Sound like Saddam’s Iraq? Think again. This neatly capsulizes the Bush administration’s ongoing depredations in Colombia, all under the shady banner of the war on drugs.

The big difference is that Saddam’s hideous use of poison gas against the Kurds and, most likely, against Iran occurred more than 15 years ago. Since the Gulf War, Saddam’s mad pursuits have been more on the order of chemistry experiments in bombed out basements. But the Bush administration’s toxic war on Colombian peasants is happening now, day after day, in flippant violation of international law.

Indeed, as Bush offers pious homilies on Iraq’s possible hoarding of so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction, his administration and its backers from both parties in congress are poised to unleash a new wave toxins in the mountains of Colombia, including a dangerous brew of biological weapons its proponents rather quaintly call mycoherbicides. Let us call it: Agent Green.

The leading germ war hawk in the congress these days is Rep. Bob Mica, a Republican from Florida. In mid-December, Mica called on his pals in the Bush administration to uncork a currently banned batch of killer fungi and begin a campaign of saturation spraying. “We have to restore our mycoherbicide,” Mica fumed. “Things that have been studied for too long need to be put into action. We found that we can not only spray this stuff, but we found that we can also deactivate it for some period of time-it will do a lot of damage-it will eradicate some of these crops for a substantial period of time.”

Of course, Agent Green also kills everything else it touches. There’s not even a pretense to call these germ bomblets “smart fungi.” This is the drug war as it might be waged by Dr. Mengele. Mica’s bracing call for an unfettered germ war on Colombia should jotted down by junior legal eagles with dreams of becoming future prosecutors of war crimes.

But Mica is far from a lone crazed voice. Even the perpetually conflicted Colin Powell is on record supporting the use of biological agents as a key part of Plan Colombia. Indeed, Anne Peterson, the US ambassador to Bogota, testified recently that she believed bio-weapons had already been deployed in Colombia. Bizarrely, she later retracted this chilling observation, saying that it had been made under duress. Ms. Peterson didn’t say who had applied the thumbscrews.

Then there’s Rand Beers, one of the few holdovers at the State Department from Clintontime. It’s easy to see why this biowar zealot appealed to the Bush crowd. Back in the late 90s, Beers was all for using germ weapons on crops in drug-producing countries. Now, as Assistant Secretary of State for narcotics, Beers trots across the globe to various international conferences where he invariably is forced to defend this toxic footnote to Plan Colombia against critics who charge that it violates, among other treaties, the Biological Weapons Convention. Beers often says that the toxic weapons are needed to fight international crime syndicates. This heady bit of sophistry is hardly an exemption from the prohibitions, which, it must be pointed out, the Bush administration doesn’t believe in anyway, even though they are trigger-happy to invoke its provisions against enemy states, such as Iraq.

So, as in Macbeth, sin plucks on sin.

Agent Green is a genetically engineered pathogenic fungi, conjured up by the US Department of Agriculture’s experiment station in Beltsville, Maryland. It is now being produced with US funds by Ag/Bio Company, a private lab in Bozeman, Montana and at a former Soviet bioweapons factory in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The labs are brewing up two types of killer fungi, Fusarium oxysporum (slated for use against marijuana and coca plants) and Pleospora papveracea (engineered to destroy opium poppies).

The problem is that both fungi are indiscriminate killers, posing threats to human health and to non-target species. Add to this the fact that when sprayed from airplanes and helicopters, Agent Green will be carried by winds and inevitably drift over coffee plantations, fields, farms, villages, and water supplies.

Agent Green also threatens the ecology of the Colombian rainforest, one of the most biologically diverse on the planet. These forests harbor a greater variety of species per acre than any country’s. But the Colombian forests are already under frightful siege from gold mining, oil companies, logging outfits and cattle ranching. By one count, Colombia has already lost more than a third of its primary forest and continues to lose forest at a rate of 3000 square miles (or nearly 2 million acres) a year. It’s possible that the Agent Green operation may saturate more than a million acres of Colombian rainforest, with potentially devastating ecological consequences for endemic wildlife and plants.

So it’s likely that Amazonia could become collateral damage in the Bushites’ bio-war adventurism.

This grim prospect may place the US in squarely in violation of yet another international treaty with which Bush, the former cocaine tooter, is charmingly unacquainted: the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). ENMOD grew out of the worldwide outrage sparked by the use of Agent Orange and other environmentally malign potions plastered across Southeast Asian during the Vietnam war. Adopted by the UN in 1976 and signed by the US, ENMOD prohibits any signatory nation from using the environment as a weapon of war, which the spraying of Colombia constitutes by definition.

The US bio-bomblets can’t even be made to stay in Colombia, but, like the pesticides and fumigants already dropped, will inevitably stray across the Colombian border into Ecuador and Peru. Both nations vehemently oppose the US biowar plan and charge that it violates international law. Specifically, they cite a non-proliferation section of the Biological Warfare Convention that prohibits the transfer of germ weapons and technology from one nation to another. Presumably, the Bush administration now considers Colombia a wholly owned colony, where even remote Andean valleys are in the toxic grip of the US empire.

“If Agent Green is used anywhere, it will legitimize agricultural biowarfare in other contexts,” says Edward Hammond, director of The Sunshine Project, the anti-biowar group that has done excellent work in exposing the environmental consequences of toxic spraying in Colombia. “Reasoning in a similar manner as the US, others might prepare a biological attack on the US tobacco crop, which poisons millions worldwide, or those opposed to alcohol might target grapes or hops.”

Eradication programs are a foolhardy way of addressing problems associated with drug consumption. It doesn’t work, it oppresses the weak, and merely plays into the pockets of the drug profiteers, from the cocaine generals to the drug cartels and the banks who launder the money.

“In much of rural Colombia, there is simply no way to make a legal living,” says Adam Isacson, of the Center for International Policy. “Security, roads, credit, and access to markets are all missing. The most that many rural Colombians see from their government is the occasional military patrol or spray plane. When the spray planes come, they take away farmers’ illegal way of making a living, but they do not replace it with anything. That leaves the farmers with some bad choices. They can move to the cities and try to find a job, though official unemployment is already 20 percent. They can switch to legal crops on their own and risk paying more for inputs than they can get from the sale price. They can move deeper into the countryside and plant drug crops again. Or they can join the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, who will at least keep them fed.”

Of course, the drug war has little do with the real motives of this ghastly program. The truth of this can be divined in the numbers. Billions in US aid and thousands of gallons of chemical pesticides have been poured on Colombia with little dent in coca production. In fact, the flow of drugs from Colombia is increasing at a rapid clip.

Back when the Clinton administration was pushing a somewhat reluctant congress to approve its multi-billion project dubbed Plan Colombia, none other than Rand Beers swore that the spray and burn tactics would “eliminate the majority of Colombia’s opium poppy crop within three years.” Congress bought Beers’ song and dance, approving $1.3 billion dollars. (As a pre-condition for receiving the money, Congress required Colombia to begin operational testing of bioweapons. Bowing to world pressure, President Clinton waived the requirement.)

In the past five years, nearly a million acres of land in Colombia has been blitzed by pesticides and fumigants, rendered as sterile as the fields of Carthage after Scipio Africanus’ last cruel visit. But over the same period production of cocaine in Colombia has more than tripled. Opium production is also soaring, increasing by more than 60 percent since 2000. Colombia now accounts for more than 30 percent of the heroin consumed in the US.

The reason for this will be obvious to anyone who has read our book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press. War, especially covert ones, and drugs go hand in hand. Colombia is mired in a three-way civil war, with each side, guerillas, paramilitaries and the government troops, funding their operations from proceeds from the sale of drugs. The bloodier the conflict, the greater the flow of drugs.

But from the beginning Plan Colombia was only ostensibly about drugs. It was really a way to use the drug war to underwrite the Colombian military’s savage war against the FARC and other rebel groups and secure US control over Colombian oil, gas and mineral reserves. The so-called eradication programs have targeted areas controlled by the FARC, rather than even larger swaths of land held by paramilitaries, serving as vicious proxy-warriors for the Colombian government.

According to Rep. Bob Barr, since the implementation of Plan Colombia at least 22 US helicopters have been shot down by Colombian rebel groups-a figure the Pentagon coyly refuses to confirm or deny. However, the State Department confirmed that last month 3 US planes were struck by groundfire on the same day.

The US presence in the war is being waged under the jurisdictional banner of the State Department, so often in the past a sign of the darker presence of the CIA and other covert warriors. In December, Colin Powell revealed his intention to up the permanent fleet of US attack helicopters in Colombia to 24. The State Department informed congress that new pilots were being trained at “a classified location” in New Mexico.

Now, it appears that the Bush administration has given Congressman Mica the greenlight to work his dark magic on the reauthorization of Plan Colombia, where he would insert language once again requiring the use of Agent Green as condition of the Colombia government getting its hands on US billions. These days they don’t even go to the bother of trying to hide the strings.

There’s plenty of evidence that Colombian government is now totally under the sway of Washington and will be only too happy to oblige, even if that means allowing the US to launch biological warfare attacks on its own peasants.

In a bracing irony, Colombia now presides over the UN Security Council, which is poised to clobber Iraq for hiding its history of bioweapon development. Indeed, it was the Colombian delegation that made the controversial call to hand over an early copy of Iraq’s weapons declaration, which the US generously returned a week later-minus 8,000 pages.

This scandalous project drones on under the radar of the mainstream press, ever loath to tackle seriously any topic wrapped in the holy robes of the drug war. Yet, what it really adds up to is a form of environmental terrorism. The toxic wasteland and human suffering left in the wake of these operations is not accidental, not, to use the fetching term of the economists, a uncomfortable externality of an otherwise benign project. Instead, it is a calculated tactic, designed to evoke fear and terror-the carpetbombing of the drug war.

Don’t say the toxic warriors in the Bush administration aren’t bibliophiles. Obviously they’ve read Silent Spring. Only not as the stark warning Rachel Carson intended, but as a war plan which they are now bent on putting into global action.

We are not sure about the accuracy of the reference to Rep. Bob Mica, as we can easily find Internet references to Florida Representative John Mica, who has represented Florida’s 7th Congressional District since 1992, well before this story was written. We’ve included a picture of Congressman John Mica under the assumption that he’s the actual Representative referred to in the article.

The Cannabis Chronicles ongoing archive of stories documenting the history of efforts to use Fusarium as a bio-herbicide weapon in the drug war now continues with another entry that originated in the New York Times . . .

Drug War Awaits Attack of Killer Fungus

By JIM ROBBINS

July 18, 2000

Dr. David C. Sands holds out a clear plastic petri dish filled with a white fuzzy fungus growing across the bottom. This substance, he believes, is the key to ending much of the world’s production of illicit drugs.

Members of Congress also believe that Dr. Sands and other researchers may be on to a powerful and environmentally safe method of killing not only coca plants, but also marijuana and poppy plants. The members have asked the government of Colombia to test a strain of Fusarium oxysporum over the next two years. If it proves effective, the disease will be sprayed on vast fields of coca plants there, and experts say it could wipe out much of the coca crop within a year.

The research holds such promise that officials at Montana State University ended it two years ago, fearing it could make the university a target of drug cartels. But the technique had already been developed.

Others are not sure that fusarium will be effective against the the cartels. ”Efficacy is high on my list of concerns,” said Eric Rosenquist, a United States Department of Agriculture official involved with international research programs. ”You can put a lot of energy into this and get nothing out in the end.” Mr. Rosenquist said a naturally occurring fusarium coca virus in Peru had killed only 40 percent of the crop there.

An attack on coca plants may be only a first salvo in the attack of the fusarium fungus. Dr. Sands and others believe that the use of fungal disease is an ideal way to kill a broad range of undesirable plants. Research on fusarium has been under way for years, and Dr. Sands and other scientists say the research is about to usher in an era of effective and environmentally safe controls that would be alternatives to chemical herbicides and genetically modified organisms.

Biological controls, the use of a pest’s enemies against it, are old: centuries ago, the Chinese built bridges between trees so predatory ants could find and destroy aphids. But biological control is not yet proven as a viable alternative to chemicals. Most diseases and predatory insects, for example, are not especially deadly; they ”farm” a plant, attacking it but not wiping it out, so they can keep consuming it. ”They live in total coexistence, like real estate agents,” Dr. Sands said. ”They take a percentage. If they took too much they would be out of business.”

But some diseases are especially virulent, wiping out most or all of the host. Phytophtora, a fungus that destroyed potatoes in 19th-century Ireland and caused the great famine there, is one. Fusarium, Dr. Sands said, is another of the ”Attila the Hun” diseases, and there are strains of fusarium for virtually every cultivated plant and many wild ones.

A plant pathologist, Dr. Sands came to the field of bioherbicides in his search for a way to treat exotic plants from Asia that run rampant through Western range land because they are unchecked by native enemies. Some diseases found in Montana are being tested on these weeds. But a much more effective approach, Dr. Sands said, may be to bring back the fungal diseases that the weeds evolved with in Central Asia and elsewhere and use them as herbicides.

He has had collaborators scouring Kazakhstan and Russia for diseases that evolved with two especially difficult species, spotted knapweed and leafy spurge, and some have been shipped to the United States where they remain in a containment facility in Maryland awaiting approval to be used in testing.

In 1987, while working with weeds, Dr. Sands got a call from the department of agriculture. Worried about a revolution in Peru, Coca-Cola had established a coca plantation in Hawaii to assure a supply of the plant for its soft drinks. (The stimulating components of the plant are not included in the product.)

When the plantation was abandoned, the department used the plants to test herbicides that might be used in the drug war. But something killed many of the plants in a control plot that was not being sprayed. Dr. Sands discovered that it was a strain of fusarium.

Dr. Sands cultured the fungus and spread it as granules on a three-acre plot. It killed nearly all of the coca plants.

Fusarium is especially virulent on plants that dominate a landscape, he said. Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight are both fungal diseases similar to fusarium. They destroyed trees across America because those trees were the only ones that many cities planted.

While Dr. Sands believes that importing diseases can be an effective approach to combating exotic weeds in Montana, officials in Colombia say they will use an indigenous fungus, a strategy Dr. Sands also advocates, because coca is a native plant. But because politics as well as biology is involved, the outcome in Colombia remains in question.

Conservationists generally favor substitutes for chemicals in killing weeds, but some are not sure that de facto biological warfare is the answer. They worry about ”mission drift”; a disease may start as an effective enemy of coca but somehow change hosts and kill important nontarget plants, like bananas, or attack wild relatives of the coca plant and threaten biodiversity.

Dr. Peter Stiling, a professor of biology at the University of South Florida who has studied introduced species, says possible unintended effects have not been sufficiently examined. ”I am not prepared to come down on one side of the fence.” Dr. Stiling said. ”But I think we should be careful. It’s difficult enough to find the nontarget effects of insects, and it’s even more difficult for nontarget effects of fungi and bacteria.”

Such problems are often subtle at first and might not be found for a long time, Dr. Stiling said. A study in Oregon has indicated that the use of Btk, a bacterial pesticide for control of the western spruce budworm, may have reduced the abundance and diversity of butterfly larvae.

”There are 500 people working on fusarium,” Dr. Sands responded, ”and we don’t see it changing its host species.”

So far, no environmental problems have been blamed on fusarium, largely because it has not been widely used in the United States.,

The use of fungal disease as a herbicide was studied before by the Agricultural Research Service, but the agency determined that it wasn’t viable as a biological control primarily because it required a great deal of the product to cover the vast areas involved.

To make fusarium economical, Dr. Sands and other researchers have discovered they can use a native grass seed to culture the fungus. In a patented process, they spray fusarium on the seed and drop it; when it hits the ground the fungus multiplies. Once the fungus kills the coca plants, the theory goes, the grass seed or whatever seed officials choose to use, takes over for the dead plants.

What’s more, the fungus lasts in the soil. ”They kill and they survive the nongrowing season perhaps for as long as five years,” Dr. Sands said.

Another advantage to fungal defoliants is that while chemicals must be sprayed on coca plants from very low altitudes during daylight, fusarium can be dropped from thousands of feet above the fields at night.

Although the university ended the fungus research, Dr. Sands said that others could easily follow his formula for making fungus-based bioherbicides.

Culturing fungus is fairly simple and can be taught in a couple of weeks, he said.

The coca producers could respond with a fungicide or disease-resistant plants, but Dr. Sands said that could take many years.

It all makes an individual wonder if we wouldn’t be better off were the drug war an actual declared war. Certainly, under international law, the use of chemical and biological weapons against combatants is prohibited, and violations of those provisions are taken seriously. Here, however, in the quasi undeclared war on drugs, it seems to be considered quite seriously.

Here’s a bit more on the same story from Time magazine . . .

Yikes! Attack of the Killer Fungus Is a Moldy Plan
Thursday, Jul. 06, 2000 By TONY KARON

The war on drugs in Colombia is starting to look more and more like Vietnam every day, and not only because the U.S. is now advocating defoliation. The New York Times reported Thursday that Washington has leaned on Colombia to begin field-testing the fungus Fusarium oxysporum for use in eliminating coca crops, as the price for the billion-dollar aid package Washington is sending to that nation’s military. Human rights organizations had questioned the wisdom of seeking to combat drug cultivation by beefing up an army with a deplorable human rights record in a decades-old civil war, but it’s environmentalists who’re up in arms over the Fusarium proposal. The U.S. is proposing blanketing much of Colombia with a fungus whose planned use against marijuana fields in Florida was stopped out of environmental concerns, and the Colombian authorities have reportedly been similarly reluctant to apply a solution whose wider impact remains unknown.

More important, though, Fusarium is unlikely to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S. First, biologists point out, even if the fungus proved effective against coca plants in Colombia, it would be a relatively simple matter for that country’s narco-traffickers to genetically alter their plants to make them resistant to the herbicide. But even if the fungus managed to munch its way through the entire Colombian coca crop, the economics of the drug trade dictate that the traffickers would simply set up shop elsewhere, leaving Colombia to deal with any ecological consequences. After all, as long as there’s a demand for cocaine on the streets and in the boardrooms of the United States, it’s going to be worth somebody’s while to produce it. Like Vietnam, then, a war on drugs that doesn’t address the root cause of the problem — that Americans are prepared to spend billions of dollars every year on illegal substances — may be unwinnable. A number of congressmen tried to make the same point when the Colombia aid package was voted upon, urging that some of the money be reallocated for drug-treatment programs in the U.S. But that sounds a little wussy-ish compared with the martial tones of a “War on Drugs” — even an unwinnable one.

It’s not a pretty picture that the mainstream media presents, apparently even they seem to know the drug war is not a conflict that can ever be won, even in countries with leaders who have a penchant for premature declarations of victory.

Who’s going to tell the drug warriors then?

As was detailed in the previous entry here at the Cannabis Chronicles, a movement was started in the late 1990’s to use Fusarium fungus as a bio-herbicide to exterminate both Cannabis and Coca. Our archival coverage continues with another article from 1999, this one from a magazine called the New Scientist.

Operation Eradicate

* 11 September 1999
* From New Scientist Print Edition.
* Kurt Kleiner

FLORIDA’S law enforcement agents destroy about 100 000 marijuana plants every year. And that’s just 20 per cent of the estimated total grown there. Many of the crops lie deep in the Everglades, where there is dense vegetation to camouflage them and alligators to deter inquisitive state officials. But last April, Jim McDonough, director of Florida’s drug control policy, decided to get tough. He suggested spraying the Everglades with a fungus that would kill off the marijuana but leave other plants untouched.

When the story appeared in newspapers in July, it enraged environmentalists and provoked a lawsuit from a pro-marijuana group. Some critics described it as a form of biological warfare. The St Petersburg Times urged that the “killer fungus” should not be released. And several months before the story broke, David Struhs, secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), had expressed fears that the fungus would mutate and attack other plant species.

McDonough’s suggestion was based on research into biocontrol funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), aimed at finding a cheap and environmentally friendly alternative to herbicides. The Florida office of drug control policy now says both the media and the DEP had misunderstood McDonough’s proposal. He never suggested actually spraying the fungus over the swamps, the office maintains, but merely wanted to test it in a quarantine facility in Gainesville. Indeed, the DEP has since sanctioned this proposal, but according to Albert Wollermann, the office’s lawyer, there are no immediate plans to go ahead with the tests.

Selective killers
The Florida eradication scheme may have been shelved, at least temporarily, but the USDA continues to spend $23 million a year on research into biocontrol agents that would selectively kill coca plants, from which cocaine is derived, and opium poppies. And some of those are poised to move out of the greenhouse and into the open.

Biocontrol of weeds is certainly not a new idea, but in the past it has usually involved insects. The use of a fungus is not, however, unprecedented. For the last 25 years, researchers have had varying degrees of success in trying to control rush skeletonweed (Chondrilla juncea), which affects wheat, with a fungus called skeletonweed rust (Puccinia chondrillina).

The fungus at the centre of the Florida row is a variety of Fusarium oxysporum. Fusarium species infect the vascular system of a number of plants, from bananas to wheat, causing them to whither and die. The Florida scheme was based on work carried out by a researcher at Montana State University, Bozeman, called David Sands, who suggested that this particular variant would be lethal only to cannabis.

Sands did initially have a grant from the USDA to look at using Fusarium to control marijuana. But when he approached the Florida state government it was as head of his own company, Ag/Bio Con. The USDA says it stopped funding his research a few years ago, when lab tests showed the fungus was only marginally effective against cannabis. “The results were mediocre,” says Eric Rosenquist, leader of the USDA’s international programmes, who oversees the agency’s funding for narcotics biocontrol, “If it’s that mediocre in the greenhouse, it’s unlikely to work in the field.”

Sands would not speak to New Scientist. But his company continues its research in this area. And recent evidence suggests that he has improved the technology. Before the story broke in July, John Masterson, director of the Montana office of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), received an anonymous e-mail informing him of the Florida proposal and the Montana research. He promptly phoned the university, which confirmed that the research was taking place. But it refused to say more, explaining that its policy was not to disclose results before publication. NORML sued, and in August, before any judgment was handed down, the university began to release documents relating to the research. In some, Sands discusses patent applications he has made on a process for “virulence enhancement” of bioherbicides. It’s not clear what this enhancement consists of, but in a letter he says that he developed it after USDA funding stopped.

In the meantime, the USDA is collaborating with the UN on a programme at the Institute of Genetics in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. They hope to use the Pleospora papaveracea fungus to control opium poppies. But its main effort is concentrated on another variety of Fusarium oxysporum that attacks coca plants.

This fungus was discovered accidentally when it wiped out a test plot of coca being grown in Hawaii. Since then, USDA researchers have worked on manufacturing large amounts of the fungus in a form that is easy to store. More importantly, they have assured themselves that it will attack only coca plants. Since most pathogens evolve with their hosts, they can often survive only in that host. This selectivity can be confirmed in the lab by trying to persuade a fungus to infect first close relatives of the target plant, then progressively more distant relatives, until researchers are convinced no other plants will be affected. “We’ve done host specificity studies,” says Rosenquist of the anti-coca fungus. “We’re convinced of its safety. We’re actually at the point now where we couldn’t go any further in the greenhouse.”

In the case of cannabis, even the most rigorous host specificity studies will not reassure some people. If the anti-cannabis fungus is now more effective, it could spell disaster for farmers who grow industrial hemp. These varieties of Cannabis sativa end up as vegetable oil or fibre and can be grown legally because they are low in delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active component of cannabis.

Masterson points out that Montana, where some of the work on the fungus has been done, borders the Canadian province of Alberta, where hemp has been grown industrially since 1998. If the fungus somehow spreads to fields in Alberta, it could damage the legal crop.

“For the hemp industry, it would be devastating for the fungus to get out,” says Douglas Brown, a director of the WestHemp Cooperative in Vancouver, British Columbia. “There would be millions of dollars of losses. If this fungus is looking for Cannabis sativa, it’s not going to differentiate between high-THC and low-THC varieties.”

And even if the fungus stays put, it could destroy wild cannabis that has adapted to conditions in the areas where it is released. Losing the wild plants could make it harder to breed hemp with the traits future farmers will need, says Brown.

But Rosenquist says the real question is not whether a fungus will spread uncontrollably, but whether it will work at all. “The biggest problem with classic biocontrol is when you release it into a complex ecology,” he says. “What may work well in one place may not work in another.”

So the next step for the USDA will be to convince the government of one of the coca-producing nations—such as Peru, Bolivia or Colombia—to let field experiments take place there. But Pat Mooney, executive director of the Rural Advancement Foundation International in Winnipeg, says using biocontrol agents against narcotics crops is “agricultural terrorism,” especially if it is done without the consent of the target country.

And according to The Miami Herald, some Peruvian farmers think that this has already happened. They have accused the US of testing an anti-coca fungus that has since spread to bananas, yucca and tangerine crops.

Rosenquist denies this. And he stresses that work won’t start without permission from the country concerned. But even with the country’s consent, says Mooney, it’s dangerous. “The solution to narcotics is not just to destroy the crops. It’s a fundamental social problem, and it’s not going to be solved by a silver bullet from an airplane.”

From issue 2203 of New Scientist magazine, 11 September 1999, page 20

To our “bird brains”, it really does seem self evident that the solution to narcotics, and drugs in general, is never going to be a magic bullet from above. Not only does the specter of the inclusion of bio-warfare as a part of the drug war scream of desperation, it flies in the face of past attempts to solve one problem by introducing another one.

Pest species, whether they be an insect or a fungus or a bacteria, usually exist in enormous numbers. Pesticides and herbicides are never 100% effective for this very reason, and the population that does survive often inherits resistance.

In a worst case scenario, the Fusarium fungus released to control Cannabis is less than perfectly effective, while at the same time the fungus also mutates to attack an important food crop. This isn’t an unlikely scenario, as Cannabis itself is a resilient species, and many food crops are quite inbred as well as usually being planted in a huge mono-culture that are a pest’s or disease’s almost literal wet dream.

With all of that in mind, here’s continuing coverage in the Fusarium Attack archive, this time from Montana . . .

Montana NORML Sues University To Get Info On Fungus Research
Group Sues MSU Over Anti-Marijuana Fungus
October 14, 1999
From The Missoulian
By Michael Moore, of the Missoulian

GROUP SUES MSU OVER ANTI-MARIJUANA FUNGUS

The Montana chapter of a national organization that favors reform of marijuana laws has sued Montana State University in a battle over documents relating to a fungus that destroys marijuana plants.

The suit is filed in Missoula District Court because the director of the Montana chapter of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws, John Masterson, lives in Missoula.

The suit stems from research done at MSU involving a fung