cannabisnews.com: Activists Wary of Plan to Sow Pot-Killing Fungi





Activists Wary of Plan to Sow Pot-Killing Fungi
Posted by FoM on July 30, 1999 at 11:13:12 PT
New York Times News Service
Source: Deseret News
MIAMI — For decades, the hard part for drug agents stalking Florida's marijuana growers was finding their crop. The growers weave their plants among corn stalks and even tomato vines to foil aerial searches. In swamps, growers make berms out of muck and chicken wire and plant their crop, leaving fat, black water moccasins to stand guard.
Hidden in Florida's lush landscape, the camouflaged marijuana plants have often foiled the small army of law officers, helicopters and drug-sniffing dogs.Now the new head of the state's Office of Drug Control hopes to kill Florida's lucrative marijuana business in the very ground in which it thrives, by someday dusting suspected areas with a marijuana-eating, soil-borne fungus called Fusarium oxysporum.It is a plan that has some politicians and Florida drug-enforcement officials excited and some environmentalists worried.The fungus, a bioherbicide engineered specifically to attack plants like marijuana, is otherwise harmless, said the Montana company, Ag/Bio Con., that developed it."Is it safe, and does it work?" asked Jim McDonough, who was hired by Gov. Jeb Bush to head Florida's Office of Drug Control. "I've heard some of the top scientists in the country say 'yes.' "But McDonough, who served as director of strategy for Barry McCaffrey, the White House drug czar, said the fungus will not be used here until it is tested in rigidly controlled conditions."When you deal with science, you deal with the cost of advancing and what is the cost of not advancing," said McDonough, who pointed out that 47 percent of all marijuana seized in the United States is taken in Florida — much of it home-grown. In most years, drug agents destroy more than 100,000 plants, and in one year — 1992 — they destroyed more than 240,000 plants.But Florida has seen its environment ravaged again and again by supposedly harmless plants that thrived so well in a damp, hot climate that they overwhelmed indigenous plants. So some environmentalists say that introducing the fungus is risky and that it could mutate and cause disease, not only in wild plants but in crops as well.July 29, 1999Copyright © 1999, Deseret News Publishing Corp.Florida Mulls Use Of Controversial Anti-MJ Fungus-7/30/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread2279.shtml
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Comment #1 posted by observer on February 26, 2001 at 09:32:48 PT
related info about fusarium oxysporum
 The fungus, a bioherbicide engineered specifically to attack plants like marijuana, is otherwise harmless, said the Montana company, Ag/Bio Con., that developed it. 'Meanwhile, reportedly 3000 farmers in the Tingo Maria and Leonicio Prado area . . . have had to scratch for other means of earning a living, including panning for gold, when a plant disease, 'seca-seca' which had previously attacked coca plants broke out again in alternate crops planted in former coca beds.'" [10]In fact, the defense contractors themselves aknowledged fusarium's lack of species specificity by inanely insisting that the "species-specific" strain was "specific" to two completely different varieties of coca, Erythroxylum coca var. coca and Erythroxylum novogranatense var. novogranatense. Their own tests showed that var. novogranatense fared far better under "specific" attack than did var. coca. [11]The only way to positively identify fusarium disease is through laboratory culturing and diagnosis, and the only known defense is massive antifungal spraying combined with specially engineered resistant strains of commercial food crops - agribiz. By destroying traditional agriculture in southern Colombia (there is evidence this is also happening on the Burma-Thai border with the Akha's staple ginger crop), you destroy the campesinos hold on their land and force them into the cash economy - as sharecroppers on land they no longer own. . . drug war: agent green: mccollum's "silver bullet" - in the head, Dan Russell, 2000http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id890/pg2/ 
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