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Round-Up Ready Coca Plants
goneutt writes "Wired reports that an herbicide resistant breed of the coca plant has been found in Columbia after years of government spraying. It also appears that the process happend via selective breeding rather than gene manipulation, but it's an outside possibility that it was engineered. What does this mean about drug control policy and the extensive use of one herbicide repeatedly. Does this point the way of the future for other weeds?"
It's Colombia, not Columbia.
I don't understand what is so shocking about this. Animals are known to adapt to their environments, why can't plants? After all, there aren't the same types of plants there were in the age of the dinosaurs. They had to evolve somehow.
So a few sturdy plants survived, then mutated. Then the mutated plants thrived, and grew an adaption to the chemical.
I think scientists are really starting to get the "God" mentality -- Surely Nature would not fend for itself, after all! Nature couldn't have possibly done the smart thing without the help from Godlings.
-- RJ
HERE
but it's an outside possibility that it was engineered.
Except that according to the Wired article it wasn't an outside possibility since they didn't find any evidence of genetic tampering. The conclusion was that it was natural selection.
Doesn't matter if it is native according to Merriam-Webster:
1 a (1) : a plant that is not valued where it is growing and is usually of vigorous growth; especially : one that tends to overgrow or choke out more desirable plants
Except that Kazakhstan is larger and less poor than Colombia.
In fact, dictionary.com agrees with me.
1.
1. A plant considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome, especially one growing where it is not wanted, as in a garden.
2. Rank growth of such plants.
2. A water plant, especially seaweed.
3. The leaves or stems of a plant as distinguished from the seeds: dill weed.
4. Something useless, detrimental, or worthless, especially an animal unfit for breeding.
5. Slang.
1. Tobacco.
2. A cigarette.
3. Marijuana.
Nowhere does it contain your definition.
To my knowledge, most herbicides are effective for years, and glyphosate (Round-up) has been no different. In fact, I've only heard of one other putative instance of naturally developing resistance to Round-up. With all that's sprayed in the US to control our annual herbaceous weeds, I find it unlikely that resistance developed naturally in a comparatively slow reproducing plant such as coca.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if someone created GMO coca. There is enough money in the crop to support such efforts.
I'm a plant pathologist, however, and my experience is with fungicide resistance, so take this as you will.
Actually, it is extra potent since you get the added benefit of putting all the herbacide that the plant has absorbed right up your nose!
I'll give this one "funny", but certainly not "insightful".
Glyphosate has very close to no effect in humans, acting by inhibiting EPSP synthase (which mammals do not have).
Or, put another way, you can safely use it to kill weeds in your vegetable garden.
Wrong. Look in the dictionary.
If we spelled it Colombia then people would pronounce it Co-lohm-bia, which would sound terrible.
Actually it's the other way around: because you spell it wrong (because you think it's the same name as DC or the one in the Carolinas or whatever), you also pronounce it wrong. The Co-lohm-bia pronunciation would be far better (or at least more correct).
I think you mean, "...you can safely use it to kill weeds in your roundup-ready[TM] vegetable garden."
lets start fires in the jungles of columbia
Sure, we might kill a whole bunch of columbians, but... hey... they are columbians, not people right?
Carp, I agree with your post but why, oh why you people can't grasp that the country is called Colombia, with an "O", and the people are Colombians.
Cheers,
Carlos
You might think we would have learned from prohibition that outlawing substances has a net result of creating guys like Al Capone or Pablo Escobar, as the case may be.
Don't forget Joe Kennedy who owned the trucks that transported a lot of the hooch which is where they made their fortune.
Datura is a group of plants in the Solanaceae family. This family includes such plants as chili peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, mandrake, nightshade, wolfsbane, etc...
The Daturas (which is a category that typically includes the flowering Datura plants and the woody Brugmansia bushes) are absolutely gorgeous plants with beautiful, large flowers. Datura contains high levels of several psychologically active alkaloids called tropanes, of which the most common are atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine.
Tropanes are perhaps one of the few true hallucinogenic drugs; a hallucinogen as an agent that reliably causes its users to be immersed into an alternate reality to the degree that they cannot recognize that the reality is a product of the drug. The traditional drugs referred to as hallucinogens (e.g. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, etc...) do not typically cause hallucinations, but visual disturbances.
The mechanism behind the action of tropanes are that brain activity is focused at the region of the brain where it encounters the spine, if I understand it correctly. This is similar to what happens in humans while dreaming and is typically associated with primitive thought and urges. Users often experience vivid hallucinations, seeing and interacting with people and objects that do not exist, and generally not recognizing or understanding that they are intoxicated. Tropanes can last from several hours to several days and can raise body temperature dangerously. The active dose is not dramatically far from a deadly overdose.
Diphenhydramine and dimenhydrinate, the standard anticholinergics used for motion sickness and in sleeping pills, have similar action and can be used to produce similar effects.
Most drug users strongly recommend against the use of Datura, since it is not pleasant and often terrifying. It has an extensive history of use in shamanism (particularly in South America, where consumption of Datura was a necessary ritual amongst some to mark the passage from boyhood to manhood, and it was occasionally used in the psychoactive drink, ayahuasca) and also in Europe and Asia, where wines were made with some Datura in order to impart a mild effect from them. Additionally, other tropane containing plants are largely responsible for the "witchcraft" of the past; women would rub tropane-rich plants upon broom handles, and then rub the broom handles against their genitalia, where the tropanes readily passed into the body. This led them to believe that they were flying, which is probably why the whole witch / broomstick / flying image came into place.
In Carlos Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan", Datura is one of the allies he ingests.
If you've ever heard of Jimson Weed (Datura stramonium), you're familiar with Datura. The term originated from Jamestown, where a cook that was unfamiliar with the new world plants used Datura in his cooking and fed it to some of the settlers, who became delirious for several days.
Daturas are commonly found in home gardens, and are intensely gorgeous.
I hate to say RTFA, but RTFA. The author specifically went to Colombia to determine whether this resistant plant existed and to try and determine whether it was genetically-modified. He did find what appeared to be Roundup-resistance coca plants and had them tested at a DNA lab.
They found no evidence of any tampering. They specifically looked for evidence of the gene and the process used to develop Roundup Ready soybeans that we use in the U.S. They said that while it was possible that another way had been found the modify the plant, it was highly unlikely given an already known method.
The author's ultimate conclusion was that the plants had been selectively bred. Colombian farmers apparently often sell and trade clippings from the hardiest plants and have created a large, ad hoc breeding network.
So yeah, you're probably right. This probably couldn't have occurred naturally. But that's not what this article is about.
And no, I'm not a plant pathologist or a geneticist, just some guy who read the article. For whatever that's worth.
tp
Not ready for drugstore heroin? Did you know that heroin was originally an over-the-counter medication developed by Bayer?
For the fascinating history, read "Opium: A History", by Martin Booth. Morphine was developed to cure opium addiction, and heroin was developed to cure morphine addiction...
It's my understanding that heroin is considered so powerful a pain reliever that it is not considered medically useful. Morphine sulphate is difficult enough to control.
Anyway, I very much agree with you about the need for decriminalization of some drugs, but I disagree that interdiction is entirely ineffective. I think it's only that our pathetic efforts thus far to interdict the drug supply have failed. Napalm is cheap. I bet we can make napalm faster than they can grow coca or opium poppies, or cannabis (which isn't really in the same category as the first two).
There's only so much land to grow the crop on. It wouldn't really be all that difficult to nearly eliminate the production of these crops, but it would mean resorting to the sorts of unilateral, "damn the sovereignity of the rest of the world" tactics that have gotten us into so much hot water already.
Chasing boats and planes, or posting drug sniffing dogs at airports, or other "horse has already left the barn" efforts are not going to stop the flow of drugs, but plants need sunlight and land to grow.
Anyway, like I said, interdiction *can* be effective--but do we really want to deal with the consequences? Probably not. It's probably less damaging in the long run to simply decriminalize the problem and look at it as more of a social medicine problem.
Cannabis, on the other hand, is too useful to destroy. We should be actively promoting the cultivation of cannabis.