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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!
So please leave Colombia alone. You can't even spell the country name.
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"
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-
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.
Have you ever seen a crack baby?
No, but I have watched more than one crack adult waste away and die. One of them was a beautiful little girl from my neighborhood, and a good family, that I watched grow up.
I've watched many more lives destroyed by another plant derived drug far more common than crack and quite a few die from it. Terminal cirrhosis of the liver isn't pretty. The drug can be derived from any plant and can be purchased over the counter at any convienient store.
It isn't the plant's fault, and you simply can't destroy them all anyway, at least not without destroying ourselves as well.
This isn't just some plant god gave us to smoke.
Actually, if we just smoked the plant there would be little problem.
. . . and ruins whole country's.
No, it is the fruitless attempts at interdiction that ruin whole countries. Colombia used to be one of the prime tourist spots of the world, and they've been 'doing coke' for millenia.
By the way, I've found an interesting, herbicide free, way to deal with dandelions in my lawn (another plant that some people take offense at for some reason. I was speaking of plants, remember?)
I eat them.
KFG
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.
Or maybe if it was legal, all the drug cartels would gain even more widespread power and cause more drug related crimes.
Interdiction is a modern phenomenon. Before interdiction there were no drug cartels and no drug related crimes as we know them. The one is the cause of the other. Where do the drug cartels stand if all you have to do to get a bit of coke is to buy a Coke?
You don't see a lot of 'rum runners' around these days, do you? Just honest convienient store, liquor store and bar owners.
Aside from the drunk driving/angry drunk abuser issue the most serious crime now directly associated with alcohol is a bit of obnoxious panhandling.
Where there is no black market there is no black market crime.
KFG
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.
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