Call for biowar on drugs

[Tom]

Congressman Mark Souder has been busy in his personal war on drugs. As well as fighting against the legalisation of cannabis for medical use, the Indiana Republican has slipped a provision into a bill calling for the fungus Fusarium oxysporum to be used as a biological control agent against drug crops in foreign countries.

 

The CIA, however, has had moral doubts about using the fungus. In 2000, a CIA official told The New York Times that it was unsafe both for humans and for the environment: "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."

 

The Department of Agriculture and the Drug Enforcement Agency agree. Fusarium species are highly prone to mutation, so they can readily change hosts and infect plants they were not supposed to. This was the main reason Florida's Department of Environmental Protection rejected the fungus in 1999 as a biocontrol agent for use on outdoor marijuana crops.

 

The House of Representatives proposal to use F. oxysporum in biocontrol is not included in the Senate version of the bill, which concerns the office of the US "drug czar", and a committee will now meet to decide on the final version.

 

Meanwhile, Bausch & Lomb recalled a contact-lens solution last week amid fears that it is associated with the spread of an eye disease across the US. The disease is caused by F. oxysporum.

 

Author:New Scientist

Date:29 April 2006

Source:New Scientist

Copyright:Reed Business Information Ltd

 

In 2000, a CIA official told The New York Times that it was unsafe both for humans and for the environment

Yeah, from memory it was only some heavy protesting by the environmentalists that stopped them from releasing it in Florida (?) a few years back.

 

[WantDaChronic]

i thought they sprayed that shit in columbia on cocoa crops? anyways they were spraying something that sounded very simular because it devestate both drug and eating crops, left thousands of people hungry, without their drugs, etc. after the first spraying, the drug crops were cut down and the drug lords hired scientists to discover what the usa had sprayed and then paid them to genetically engineer a plant resistant to the stuff the usa was spraying, worked a charm too the next year, the usa sprayed again which killed off heaps of crops, yet the cocoa growers who had the new seeds were laughing because their crops were the only ones still standing and the usa thought they had won

 

same will happen to cannabis if something like that happens, if not, i'll keep some seeds in the freezer and repopulate the worlds marijuana supply, or atleast help out

[Pa-uul]

'Tis truly a diabolical concept. Thank the Lord marijuana is such a hardy plant that anything legal plants can take it can take better so, they can't do it without endangering "good" plants like crops and so forth.

[naturalmystic]

There so toxic and obsessive , a plant capable of saving the planet and these morons have nothing better to do than try and iradicate it and at the same time giving humans and plants health problems , toxic parasites