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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?"
>What does this mean about drug control policy and the extensive use of one herbicide repeatedly
One'd have thought someone would have learned something of the whole antibiotic resistance problem we've developed after years of abusing them without control. This kind of thing was not in any shape or form unpredictable or unexpected.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
the war on some plants that some people take offense at for some reason remains as daft and unwinable as it ever was.
KFG
Hey, it worked for mosquitos, lice, tuberculosis and gonorrhea. Of course it will work for weeds!
So please leave Colombia alone. You can't even spell the country name.
Its always amusing when people classify plants they dont like as weeds even though the likelyhood is that the plant has been there from before man was even a fish. Just because you dont like plants of specific types doesnt mean its a weed.
A weed is a plant that doesnt grow native in a particular area.
No, Americans don't misspell it, dumbasses misspell it.
Why is it that when I get my issue of Wired in the mail even month I just KNOW that I will eventually see every article on Slashdot?
/.
Seems the recipe to karma whore would be:
1: Monitor Wired to post their magazine stories on their site
2: Be the first to submit to
3: Rinse, Repeat
Yes yes... lets start fires in the jungles of columbia
Thats a great idea. Of course it will be good for the soil and all the plants (including the coca) will grow back faster. Sure, we might kill a whole bunch of columbians, but... hey... they are columbians, not people right?
I think this is an example of what we like to call poetic justice
A few people with an irrational fear of plants, have gone around killing them, and the plants have grown resistant to their methods. Good for them.
This is proof that you really can't outlaw nature.
Maybe its time to rethink this strategy of flailing wildly at anything that we percieve as potentially bad, and consider leaving people be to grow and use the plants that they want to.
Then if there are problems with how people use those plants, we can deal with that. We can train doctors to deal with that (and we have) we can foster an environment where people feel safe telling their doctors about what they are doing, an atmosphere of open honest discussion will lead to healthier attitudes.
Harm reduction is the key. These attempts to defeat nature arn't working, and instead are just inflating prices and making criminal gangs filthy rich. Hell the cartels that produce cocaine are known to have built submarines for drug trafficing. A cost that is passed directly on to the users.
Is it really so bad that people who like cocaine use it? Wouldn't it be better to decrease its effect on their wallets so they don't need to resort to crime? Wouldn't it be better to foster openness so those with problems are easier to help? Wouldn't it be better to take the money out of the hands of criminal gangs and use it to fund education initives to help keep people from starting in the first place?
Why are we in columbia? The problem is here at home. We need to fix the problems here at home, and the answer to that is not fighting a war on plants in some other country. It means growing up and taking responsibility for our own peoples actions. It means showing them the error of their ways, and then letting them make their own decisions on the matter.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I think the thrust of the article wasn't "we're surprised that plants mutated" but "its cool that these farmers that the government says are ignorant clods with no intelligence are actually practicing fairly sophisticated cloning techniques, all under the radar".
Sure, plants can mutate, but the article talks about how FAST they've mutated. In other words, they had help, and the help likely came from the farmers via an "underground" market for clones of the resistant plants.
T-R-Double O-L!
>Drugs affect your mind to make you crave them
more than food, sex, and life itself.
Of course they do. That's why everyone I know who has ever tried drugs is now a slobbering mess who crawls on their belly from one crackhouse to the next.
>Drug usage is no longer a choice for those that have tried it.
Did you just get out of your DARE class, or what?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
You can't win any war without criteria for success or failure. The purpose of perpetual war is to line the pockets of those whose economic interests it serves. Monsanto, FARC and the U.S. intelligence establishment do really well on the Colombian operation, and they'll continue to do well on it as long as people vote for the congressman with the largest advertising budget.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Is more of our tax dollars going towards killing people, plants, and animals in a country that doesn't want us there, as opposed to reinvesting that money into us, the country, and anti-drug efforts in the homeland.
And I expect that in another 10-15 years, we'll see another story about how now coca have been resistant to whatever our new chemical of choice is going to be.
Not to turn this into a "war on drugs" tirade, but the current administration, and it's directives, are so far off target, it's not funny.
By the way... While you're thinking about how much money has already been sunk into this, how many lives have been lost, and how many people in columbia we've hurt (or at least hurt their livelihoods, whether they were coca farmers or not), consider the $75 billion dollar proposal that Bush will submit in January to further the war in Iraq.
Now think about the positive changes that could be made here in the USA, which is where all of us funding these fiascos live, if we used the combined monies for these wars to improve our homeland.
If you can picture it (I can!), then you surely are not a politician, I'm guessing.
I took away your "in Colombia" to increase accuracy. For something as easy as cocoa, marajuana, or poppies, source-level interdiction just isn't going to work. Source-level interdiction raises the street price, making it more profitable to become a source, making new sources come online at least as fast as you can eliminate the old ones. It's the Free Market at work.
IMHO, drugs should be legalized and regulated like alcohol and tobacco, simply because the budgetary and social cost of "crimes of financing" are exceeding the what the budgetary and social costs would be, if regulated. Simple, pragmatic economics.
Blast from the past, even praise for Richard Nixon:
In 1968 Richard Nixon ran at least partly on reducing Crime. After election, he felt it necessary to deliver on his promises. Crimes of finance for drugs were felt to be a large part of the problem, so they were going to attack drugs. He was all set to go on a law'n'order, source-interdiction based drug policy, but his advisor(s) (Name forgotten, but there was a key one, here.) told him that it would never work. He had to work on demand reduction.
They put in place demand reduction, largely in the form of drug treatment. It worked, at least within the timeframe and measurements they used. They reduced crime.
By the 1972 race Viet Nam was the big issue, and everyone had forgotten about crime. After the election, they quietly dismantled the drug treatment programs, and the approach has largely lain fallow, since.
BTW, Clinton and Greenspan were aiming for a "soft landing" with the economy, breaking the boom/bust cycles. They felt they had just achieved their target, as the dot-com boom hit. Of course the boom was followed by a matching bust, and the soft landing goal has been forgotten, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
By forcibly limiting the supply, we ensure that few addicts will be willing to share with others.
No, instead you get drug dealers and addicts desperate for cash for their fix. No social cost there, no sir...
Well thats simply absurd. They may not be continuing to increase but realise this... if you are setup ot make drugs, then making drugs is cheap. The marginal cost is so small as to be ridiculous.
Many drugs, including coke, are more expensive by the gram than gold.
Tylanol and Heroine can be produced at about the same cost. Heroin however costs a hell of alot more than tylanol for no other reason than the drug war. Risk in moving it, artifical difficulty in producing it caused by restrictions on chemical sales intended to make it harder to produce, difficulty shipping it, all these things lead to higher prices.
Take cocaine. It should be extracted from coca leaves with certain solvents that dry cleanly and don't leave harmful residues. These are generally not legal to ship to columbia for the exact reason that thats what they are used for.
So the cartels (which are not FDA regulated of course) use whatever they can get their hands on, often using benzine, result? Coke users are regularly exposed to benzine. Prices are insane (a book from the early 90s lists the price at 17 grand per kilo, and broken up into individual street level amounts that same kilo will bring in over 100 grand)
Swiss heroin studies that allowed users to buy heroin at a price that is about what it would be if it were legal found that they generally were able to live normal lives and reduced other illegal activities by 90% in the course of just a few weeks.
This war on drugs makes no economic sense. It doesn't stop users, it gives huge economic incentives to the criminal gangs. It increases the harm involved with drugs both by adding artifical harm (prison terms) and by reducing the quality of the drugs themselves.
It is the work of people who are too weak of mind to face the issue as it should be. People who arn't willing to allow people to make their own decisions like adults, and then marvel at how those people act like children.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
We've pretty much already done this.
If you work in an office, there's probably a pot of liquid crack around. And I'd wager there's also a sign with something like, 'if you drink the last cup, brew the next pot,' cause you know those adicts don't like to wait for a fix.
And you call my thinking simplistic?
Sure its easy to spray plats and kill them. However there is real economic incentive for the people cultivating them (the people, incidently, who you are also exposing to these chemicals), to find ways to make the plants resistant through breeding or engineering (which the cartels do thave the economic ability to develop) or to otherwise mitigate the damage caused by spraying.
It is an arms race and has not managed to stop the flow of drugs into this country.
As the link posted by another respoinder mentioned the price of coke is down now. Not down to the levels it would be without prohibition (still over 10 to 20 times that if you read the link), but down none the less.
You can't get at the root of a problem that you are forcing underground. You need to bring it above ground and attack it where it should be attacked, in the doctors office. This is a medical issue, and a personal responsibility issue.
We need to start treating people like adults, and let them and their doctors take upo the issue, and decide for themselves.
Addiction is complex, but that doesn't mean you duck the issue. SPray all the plants you want, you are not going to erradicate the problem. You are attacking a symptom not a disease. The disease is here at home. The disease is a medical issue of the users. Lets stop hurting them more than they already are by their affliction.
Attacking the plant for the sins of its user is ducking the issue at best.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
hhh good point. Yes. That prices are comming down indicates a supply and demand equilibrium. I hadn't thought of it that way. Still, it points to the fact that neither the supply nor the demand is responding to these efforts anymore.
Even when the price was 5 times what it is today, people still used it, it still flowed into this country.
I am not ready for drugstoe heroin yet either. I think we need to not lose the spirit of experimentation here. The drug war was an experiment. A hypothesis was made that use of our police to enforce prohibition could fix the problem. That has, for the past 60 years, proven false time and again. It proved false for alcohol, its proving false for heroin, its proving false for coke, its proving false for marijuana.
We need to declare this experiment over and try a new one.
We should regulate these things. Maybe make heroin available with a doctors prescription, so at the very least you need to go see a doctor and tell him you want heroin and talk with him before you can get it.
As it is now, they can't even prescribe it for what it is medically good for: chronic pain. There are many terminally ill people who could benefit, and THEY can't even get it, because we have decided we need to keep it out of the hands of other people.... people who we have failed to keep it from.
Its time to try something different.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It also appears that the process happend via selective breeding rather than gene manipulation, but it's an outside possibility that it was engineered.
Those are both the same thing: evolution by selection. By spraying coca with herbicide either we are selecting for coca which is resistent to herbicide, or we are selecting for drug producers who are capable of gentically engineering coca to make it resistant to herbicide. Anti-drug measures apply selective pressures to the entire system of production, not just the plant.
What does this mean about drug control policy
The enforcers are likely to renew and concentrate their efforts on the point of adaptation within the adversary system, misunderstanding the scope of the problem which they confront, believing it to be a plant rather than a system of production which may adapt at any stage. My prediction: They will find a solution to the problem of resistant plants, apply it, and the system will evolve again, adapting at that point or some other.
They are playing wac-a-mole with evolution.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
It may be safe to use in your vegetable garden, but on the other hand, it might be a bad idea to blanket the hills of south american countries with the stuff. In addition to the obvious environmental problems caused by using a "broad-spectrum" herbicide on entire regions, the surfactant in the RoundUp formulation (polyoxyethylene amine, POEA) might affect a whole gamut of animals, plants, and microorganisms to varying degrees. Gotta wonder which administration member has huge stock holdings in Montsanto, I'm sure a lot of tax money can be redirected to his private accounts through the columbian warondrugs.
>
If they've crossed it with the "plant that yields up to four times more cocaine than existing plants and promises to revolutionise Colombia's drugs industry" which they came across this summer, then yes.
To quote:
A toxicologist, Camilo Uribe, who studied the coca, said: "The quality and percentage of hydrochloride from each leaf is much better, between 97 and 98 per cent. A normal plant does not get more than 25 per cent, meaning that more drugs and of a higher purity can be extracted."
Looks like the "War on Drugs"® has turned out to be about successful as the "War on Terror"®
But then the "War on Drugs" was never about drugs and the "War on Terror" was never about terror.
The Machine stops.
Ah, but that ignores the psychological side of addiction, which is at least as relevant as the physiological side. We can't know what was going through the mind of the monkey. Humans, on the other hand, can at least express their thought process. We also know before we try cocaine exactly what it is and what it can do (or we should, anyway; I don't think I know many people who would snort a random white powder without knowing what it is and that it is supposed to make them feel good,) and we also know the consequences (monetary, social, psychological) of continuing to do it. All the experiment above proves is yes, cocaine is chemically addictive, but we already knew that. So is cocaine, so is alcohol, christ, so is caffeine. I'm not calling anyone a troll here, but sometimes scientific evidence alone is not enough, especially when dealing with anything related to humans. Psychology plays a factor in *every* decision we make, drug usage included.
Don't forget the "gray areas," like Rush Limbaugh or your sterotypical suburban housewife. Oxycontin and Valium are essentially heroin in pill form, but because they're made by pharmaceutical companies, they're legal. There are plenty of doctors out there who will write prescriptions with no questions asked. If you counted legal prescription drug abuse with the normal culprits, I'd venture to say that a full 25% of this country are habitual drug users. Probably a lot more, actually.
It's Colombia, not Columbia.... sigh.
dude, you're talking about a monkey... in a cage... with an unlimited supply of drugs and food. it's not like the monkey REALLY had a choice. it's not like they could offer the monkey a job or something to read. so they added a female and he didn't screw her... maybe it means drugs make you smart enough to realize that you live in a fucking cage and reproducing isn't worth the effort.
i like drugs. i use them sometimes. it's limited to marijuana and alcohol these days but i've tried most of them. if i had an unlimited supply and someone to feed me and clean up after me... maybe i'd do drugs all the time. but i live in the Real World where i have to feed myself and work for my drugs. i bet if you made it harder for the monkey to get the drugs the monkey would still do them BECAUSE THEY ARE FUN. seriously, these drug "studies" prove one thing -- drugs are better than nothing.
i'd suggest that if you put a slashdot reader in a cage and supplied 'it' with an unlimited supply of video games it would push those buttons until it's fingers were raw. because it's fun, because we are alive, because humans are big fans of fun.
i grew up in the suburbs. there wasn't a whole lot to do outside of play video games (but my parents wouldn't allow me to buy a game system) or play sports (i was always the last picked). then along come the police with their "DARE" program, telling me i have to say no to drugs. what the fuck am i supposed to do then? all the 'adventures' my parents experienced as children have been bulldozed, made flat and covered in asphalt.
if you want to keep kids off of drugs give them something fun to do and recognize that you've got to have different fun things for different people -- silver bullets are for warewolves. when i was 14 i would have loved to learn machine shop skills or electronics but there were no extra-curricular groups for that in my school. they were too busy building a new football stadium and gutting the arts classes.
as for the question: are drugs harmful? yes. but so are cars, computers, porn, sunlight, alcohol, couches and laser pointers... in the wrong hands. but all of those things are very helpful to many many people.
fear is the mind killer