KILLER FUNGUS TOUTED TO ERADICATE STATE POT CROP

TALLAHASSEE -- There's a killer fungus among us, and Florida's new drug czar Jim McDonough hopes to one day let it loose to murder the state's illegal marijuana crops.

Only one problem: Scientists at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection fear the fungus could mutate, spread and kill off everything from tomatoes to endangered plants.

McDonough, who came to Florida to join Gov. Jeb Bush's administration after working for White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey, has been holding meetings in Tallahassee to try to get state agencies on board with the idea of testing Fusarium oxysporum, a co-called "'mycoherbicide," in Florida.

"'It's not been used yet," McDonough said, adding that if Florida were to test the soil-borne fungus, it would do so in a state quarantine facility in Gainesville, where researchers isolate citrus canker and other plant
diseases. Before it could ever be released, it would need extensive review.

The Montana company that is developing the killer fungus, Ag/Bio Con., gave state officials literature saying the fungus "does not affect animals, humans or any other crops."

DEP scientists reached a far different conclusion: "It is difficult, if not impossible, to control the spread of Fusarium species," DEP Secretary David Struhs wrote in a letter to McDonough. "The inability to guarantee that the organism will not mutate and attack other plant species is of most concern.

"Mutation of the organism would not only threaten Florida's natural environment, but would also put at risk our economically vital agricultural industry."

Florida's warm soils, Struhs wrote, could make the mutation worse. The fungus can remain in the soil for as long as 40 years.

"Without considerably more information to address the concerns noted above," Struhs wrote, "I strongly recommend that Florida not proceed further with this proposal."

McDonough followed up with a letter to Struhs and Agriculture Commissioner Bob Crawford: "Before we conclude that it cannot be done," McDonough wrote, "let us take every opportunity to consider how it might be done safely."

In June, both Struhs and Crawford signed off on the idea of quarantine testing in Gainesville, and that's as far as the proposal has gone. McDonough said he has not pitched the idea to Gov. Jeb Bush.

McDonough has the backing of U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Longwood, who called mycoherbicides the "silver bullet" in the war on drugs. McCollum and U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., helped push for $23-million that Congress appropriated this year to eradicate plants that provide the raw material for cocaine, heroin and marijuana. The money is earmarked for research in foreign countries, but McDonough wants to see if he can get some of the funds for Florida.

Tim Moore, commissioner for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said the fungus could be a valuable addition to the state's anti-drug arsenal, as long as tests prove it is safe.

Another supporter is Betty Sembler of St. Petersburg, wife of developer Mel Sembler, one of the Republican party's biggest fund-raisers. Mrs. Sembler is an anti-drug activist who founded the group Drug Free America. She says she supports the idea of using bio-control on drug crops because she thinks it is a better than spraying pesticides like Paraquat.

Information provided by McCollum's office says, "There is no danger to the environment."

An old Florida story

Government foresters once spread the seeds of Australian melaleuca trees over the Everglades to help drain the swamp. Now, decades later, the state is waging a chemical and biological war against the noxious trees. Like arboreal shock troops, melaleuca trees have marched through the Everglades, draining wetlands years after the state decided that the Everglades were better off wet in the first place

Kudzu, a Chinese vine, was distributed by the government to control erosion in the 1920s and soon became a botanical bully, growing as much as a foot per day.

Water hyacinth, a plague in Florida lakes and rivers, was carried into the state by a woman who lived near Palatka. She saw the pretty floating flower at the World's Fair in New Orleans and brought it home to put in her fish pond. It spread, and now the state spends millions of tax dollars to spray pesticides into the water.

In fact, Florida is so concerned about the spread of exotic plants that, last year, the Legislature more than doubled the amount of money set aside to battle botanical invaders on state lands during the next decade.

"Our concern (with McDonough's proposal) is that we don't want to move forward with anything that creates more problems than it solves," said Jerry Brooks, assistant director of the DEP's division of water resources.

Florida's pot crop

On an average year, the state confiscates about 100,000 plants, Broadway said.

North Florida typically has the biggest pot crops. But statewide, urban indoor growers have been harvesting more and more of Florida's homegrown cannabis.

Last year, FDLE only confiscated about 55,000 plants, because drought and wildfires sent growers indoors. Pinellas County was second to Miami-Dade County in pot-growing arrests and indoor growing operations last year. Spreading a killer fungus wouldn't put a dent in the indoor crop, which is providing increasingly potent strains of marijuana.

Predictably, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws said McDonough is proposing to use a sledgehammer to kill a flea.

"'It looked like they wanted to debut these (mycoherbicides) in South America, but the governments down there didn't want any part of it. They didn't want to be America's guinea pigs," said Paul Armentano, a spokesman for NORML in Washington. "I'm pretty shocked to hear that someone would suggest testing this in an American state."

But McDonough says Florida is the ideal place to test the fungus.

"Unfortunately, we have a wonderful climate and a wonderful soil for growing marijuana," said McDonough. "I'm concerned about the supply. Florida is off the map in its marijuana usage. It is not a benign drug. It is a dangerous drug."

FDLE Commissioner Moore agreed: "If there's some proven, safe way to augment our efforts to keep marijuana and its associated miseries off the street, then I'd support it."

Not since the movie Reefer Madness, with its absurdly exaggerated fear-mongering about marijuana, has the War on Drugs offered such a belly laugh. Now, courtesy of Florida's new drug czar comes "Killer Fungus Touted to Eradicate State Pot Crop!"

Fresh from Washington, D.C., Jim McDonough is putting down roots in Tallahassee. This pusher of fungal fatuity is lobbying to introduce an invasive plant, a "mycoherbicide" to Florida.

Will the wonders of biotechnology never cease? "Men have become the tools of their tools," Henry David Thoreau wrote a century ago. To which I might add, "and pray let us pry the tools from the fools."

Talk about invasive. McDonough, in a tone of injured refinement, wrote a memo blasting the EPA's voices of reason, those state-employed scientists who caution against any such fungus fiasco.

Stuffily, he declaimed: "Before we conclude that it cannot be done, let us take every opportunity to consider how it might be done safely."

My, my. Let's consider:

(1) No matter that "the fungus could mutate, spread and kill off everything from tomatoes to endangered plants,"as scientists at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection fear.

(2) No matter that Florida already suffers from melaleuca run amok, since the government once seeded the Everglades with this Australian tree to help drain the swamp. Or that King-Kong kudzu, imported from China to control erosion, is covering Georgia and North Florida in a green shroud,

(3) No matter that, according to the Audubon Society, "On public lands, an estimated 4,600 acres of native wildlife habitat are lost daily to alien plants with no natural enemies."

(4) No matter that the federal government this month began regulating the discharge of ballast water from cargo ships entering all U.S. ports, fearing the environmental havoc created by the introduction of foreign species.

How far the drug czar lags behind the times. A killer fungus might have earned consideration in, say, the 1950s and 1960s, when technology seemed the answer to everything. That was during the era when The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham was published. This science-fiction classic forecast the balance of power shifting from humans to the plant kingdom. Ghastly stinging plants that walk are the byproduct of government engineering undertaken in the name of national defense and capitalist supremacy.

In our post-triffid world, we know way too much to even CONSIDER fungal frivolity. We know the potential of an alien plant to spread quickly, to crowd out native species, to disrupt fragile balances in nature.

Not even the most accomplished scientists in the field completely understand the interactions between fungi, in the soil and the roots of plants they infect. Scientists do know that, by having a biological killer attack pot plants, we might force the maryjane to evolve strong defenses. How easy it would be to lose control of the fungus

If Florida's drug czar had been content to quietly do his job, focusing on education and things that count, we might have stayed ignorant of the existence of his superfluous bureaucratic position and its consumption of taxpayer dollars. Poor McDonough. Not only is he going to be forever famous for this godforsaken folly, but also he has forced on us the familiar sadness of a bankrupt Drug War.

Thoughtful people across America, ranging from civil libertarians to chiefs of police, question the Drug War, a colossal and expensive failure that has failed to halt drug import or drug use. A stunning waste of resources, this high-profile, low-yield effort has succeeded in filling jails with young people whose nonviolent crimes have earned them decades-long or life sentences. Its continuation is "sucking positive energy out of America, exaggerating economic polarization, harming race relations, public health, our justice system, and our cities," according to Efficacy, a Connecticut-based nonprofit organization advocating, peaceful - ways to respond to social problems.

Yet when it comes to marijuana, we persist in unworkable policies. McDonough's fungus folly is just the latest fear-based, coercive effort.

Drugs are not a new phenomenon. Opiates were common in Europe. Tea from potent poppy plants was a staple in parts of Asia. The American Indians used tobacco and peyote sparingly, without the plague of abuse, in spiritual rituals, For most of human history, even when ready access to potent drugs existed, societies have regulated their use without fear-based policies. As America's own failed Prohibition proves, drugs (including alcohol) pose the worst problems when they are outlawed.

Florida's marijuana growers are as inventive as the plant is hardy. Just 30 years ago, imported pot was the cannabis of choice, with homegrown varieties filling in only in a pinch. Government interdiction created an inconvenience for potheads, who in a burst of innovation created a superior domestic crop. Surely they will get around any new fungus problem. A quick search of the Internet shows detailed fungus-fighting data already available.

Indoor gardening, for instance, is an option. Thirty years of experience have allowed cultivators to perfect techniques, in settings that range from rural barns to city office buildings, even attics. A worker doesn't even need to be on site to take advantage of a warehouse's excellent lighting to cultivate an indoor crop impossible to trace to its grower.

In Florida, smalltime growers and police even seem to enjoy a little "marijuana cat-and-mouse." I know of an instance where one of those lost-in-the-'60s types planted a pot plot in the woods. One day when the
happy farmer showed up to tend his plants, he found them uprooted. Left for him to find was the local narcotics agent's business card.

If this were 1950, the time of birth for many baby boomers, a "hooch-icide" scheme would be frightening. Some bozo of a government official might actually approve a plan to tamper with the environment, daring the gods to hit us all with the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Today the concept is funny.

The British and American governments have created a plant eating fungus to wipe out all coca, poppy and hemp vegetation from the planet. They plan to eradicate the coca plant by the year 2008: For full and up to date reports see:

http://www.tni.org/drugs

Under the directorship of Arlacchi, UNDCP developed in 1997/98 its widely criticized Strategy for Coca and Opium Poppy Elimination (SCOPE), which aims to completely eradicate the illicit cultivation of coca and opium poppy by the year 2008. Arlacchi failed to have the plan endorsed at the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in June 1998, but many elements of the integral strategy continue to be developed. In paragraph 75 the SCOPE plan notes: "UNDCP also intends to test, through an applied research programme in Uzbekistan, a biological control agent based on the plant pathogenic fungus Dendryphion papaveraceae. The agent is claimed to have been found in other central Asian States. An important step will be to confirm its natural occurrence throughout the region (in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), which would contribute to ascertaining whether it is environmentally safe for use in poppy-growing areas, especially in central Asia."

A UNDCP-sponsored open field test project indeed began in 1998 in Uzbekistan testing the fungus for its effectiveness against opium-poppy. [6] “We’ve been looking  for something like this for years and years” said Cherif Kouidri, head of UNDCP laboratory in Vienna, “It would hearten all of us if we were to find that it was indigenous to Afghanistan,” which would open the door to large-scale application in the world’s main opium producing country.[7] This project is funded primarily by the United Kingdom and experts of the Ascot based CABI Biosciences, formerly known as the International Institute of Biological Control, and the Bristol-based IACR-Long Ashton Research Station have been contracted as consultants.