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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?"
You can't win the "war" on drugs in Columbia.
As long as there's a market, there will be farmers producing drugs. Not only do the farmers get more money from growing drugs, if they refuse, they will be forced to do it.
Spraying, yanking or what have we will not make a difference.
(This is where I'd place a political rant, but there's been enough political BS on slashdot already. Besides, you all know the drill)
Underholdning.info
Stuff wants to live. There has to be a non zero probability that a small group of coca plants have a mutated gene which is resistant to whatever herbicide they are using. If the plants are allowed to pollinate naturally, then it would follow that eventually this gene would spread to a larger number of plants and since the herbicide is killing of non resistant plants, I would think this would allow for a quicker propagation of the ristant plants due to decreased competition from non-resistant plants.
I saw this documentary a while back which said that species are constantly upgrading there defences/attack mechanisms against each other, through the process of natural selection and evolution.
No doubt there will be some plants that will become resistant to existing forms herbicides. Afterall, we are already starting to deal with the horrors of germs (bacteria etc) that have become resistant to antibiotics and other medicines. It's just a natural process.
On the plus side, it means scientists will always have jobs creating new cures and herbicides.
...answers to a few questions:
1. Do all herbacides rely on the Round-Up active ingredients?
2. If not, is the herbacide in question something other than agent orange (or something similarly damaging to the environment/humanity)?
3. Can we use that instead?
Furthermore:
4. What weaknesses were created in the plant through this adaptation? Just because it has become impervious to Round-Up doesn't mean that at the same time other alterations to it's code didn't occur during it's adaptation. There's more than likely a chink in the armor (so to speak), and if this strain gets spread to 100% of the coca growing community, that chink in the armor could become a large puncture wound.
Another question I'm left with is with all that money, why the hell haven't cocaine cartels decided to invest in some genetic modification before now?
goto http://rizzn.com
The is only one more example that man can not, and should not stop the use of drugs.
Marijuana grows naturally almost anywhere in this planet, marijuana serves a thousand different purposes all of them positive. Making marijuana illegal is like...(this is for the faith-based votersr now)...saying that God made a mistake.
This same quote, attributable to oft-maligned Bill Hicks whom we love, can be applied to the coca plant. Workers in South America used to chew coca leaves to sustain them throughout the workday.
The cause of the obsession/addiction with drugs and society is a signal. We need to relax and, as a culture, become more "mellow". Give up our nine-to-five workdays and begin life anew.
Work on tasks as they arise, not to fill time. I, like many readers here, have become mostly a clock watcher. This is a task to which my years of education are seldom applied.
Now, let us all accept the Prick of the Needle of Love and journey to a Place of Peace and Beauty. As a group now, ...
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
You can't win the "war" on drugs in Columbia.
I'd be willing to bet that you dont really know much about the war on drugs in colombia other than that they are growing drugs and the US doesnt want them to. However, its much more multifaceted than that. The drug war in Colombia, at least to Colombians, is more focused around the guerilla groups and narco-trafickers mutual supporting each other. Colombia has seen much more terrorism than the US ever has, probably along the same magnitude as Israel or Ireland back in the day (I say probably because i dont have the numbers).
The "drug war" in colombia is breaking this cycle and getting rid of one of these two groups which will also play a large role in breaking the other. It can be successfully accomplished-- look at the Sendero Luminoso extermination in Peru. Let's not forget, Colombia used to be a non-factor in the war on drugs. Peru was the drug capital of South America and produced an overwhelming percentage of coca. Colombia, IIRC, was not a major player (like less than 10% of coca production) until the 1990's when Peru took a hardline stance against the Sendero Luminoso antisurgents and Escobar and the Cali cartel rose.
True, if Colombia is able to rid the country of its insurgents, the drug dealers will probably move elsewhere (Southern Panama, Ecuador, Venezuela with Chavez in power). However, the drug war in Colombia IS winnable. The general drug war, on the other hand, is a different story.
Another interesting thing about these widespread coca sprayings and focus on cocaine is that many colombian farmers are moving towards growing opium. Heroin is actually much more profitable than cocaine and is steadily increasing in its importation. Im willing to bet that in 10 years, heroine is the new cocaine.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
I guess this means we're going to breed crack adapted humans who can suck it down and then get up in the morning and go to work.
Craig
Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Also, this is an incredible poorly written article. It is basically a big tease, based on the premise that the plants might be genetically engineered, which it turns out they aren't. Also he keeps comparing farms to p2p filesharers, as if the farmers are taking a hint from 14 yr olds in the US. Selective breeding and distribution of new strains is not a new tech.
In all it is an annoying article that is full of speculation, short on facts, and proves nothing. I was pretty disappointed.
Lasers Controlled Games!
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.
But this is differnet than using roundup because there is no reason to try to cultivate plants which are resistant to it. I.e the way it is used doesn't encourage people to try to look for plants on the edges of affected areas that are doing better and breed them.....
And regarding the multiple sites issue, I would be willing to bet than insecticides are a closer parallel here though they tend to reproduce on an annual cycle as well so by this reasoning we should not see resistance to DDT either. But we do.
Also I would point out that these are sprayed areally and with limited information so it is unclear what percentage of the crop they hit in any given time, and which areas get a lower dose which allows some to survive.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Look back as Slashdot for all the lab tests done.
Unfortunately it would be considered offensive to
perform the tests on humans, but monkeys are the
next best thing:
Suppose you hook a monkey up, such that pressing
a button will give him cocaine. He'll like that!
Then, you make the button take two presses to
deliver the drug. Then 4, then 10, then 50...
Soon enough, you'll have the monkey pressing that
button tens of thousands of times to get the drug.
He won't be distracted by food or female monkeys.
He won't care if he injures himself, rubbing his
flesh raw to press that damn button. All he'll
care about is getting the drug.
You're the troll, if you ignore scientific evidence.
lets start fires in the jungles of columbia
That would be a great solution, specially if you mean District of Columbia. That way people in Colombia, and most of the world for that, would be free to shove up their noses whatever they wish.
The spraying is the initiative of the United States, which has been involved in Colombia's affairs ever since it stole the land for the Panama Canal from Colombia. Coca is grown in the north and the south, but the north is not sprayed - only the south. That is because the coca growers in the north are US-friendly and the coca growers in the south are in FARC controlled areas, a movement which among other things, wants the US out of Colombia's affairs. The south growing coca is a new phenomenom, for years FARC banned it, so all the coca grown and sent to the US in the 1970s was from the US friendly north. It only became a "problem" when the south began growing it. The US army colonel who supposedly was leading anti-drug efforts was actually involved in an operation to ship drugs to the United States.
Right now Phillip Morris is pushing the deadly tobacco drug on Chinese people. Can you imagine if China sent planes over to the US and began dropping herbicides on fields all over the US south? This is completely ridiculous, and whenever someone from south Colombia fights back against this, of course it's called "terrorism" and is used as justification for why this is necessary.
I don't think this whole thing is the US government being misguided, I think it is the US government being misleading, especially to the American people. Plenty of countries ship drugs to the US, if the product (such as marijuana) is not grown here already. But only Colombia gets this attention, only Colombia gets sent one billion a year to fight the FARC...uh, I mean, to fight coca farmers. Coca is the WMD's of Colombia - it is the excuse for doing what they *really* want to do.
Why is Colombia so important? Because Venezuela, Colombia (and from recent discoveries, Bolivia) have massive amounts of oil. The US powers-that-be want to control these natural resources. Arauca is one of the more oil-rich regions, and dozens of trade unionists in that region alone have been murdered this year. Hundreds of Colombian trade unionists are murdered every year, and the US sends one billion a year in military aid, crop destruction and so forth in order to add fuel to the fire. These policies are lobbied for by corporations like Occidental Petroleum, and I see only the most sinister motives behind their and the US's efforts in Colombia. Of course, the whole coca thing is a big WMD-like front for the real reasons, but if the US wanted to stop the global drug trade it should stop shipping tobacco to China. Hell, the US helped England invade China in order to push heroin on them over a century ago.
Let's use Napalm wherever cocaine is consumed.. ups! that would wipe out the map most american cities!! sorry, I forgot all those sacred American lifes.
Carlos J. Hernandez
Once the biochemical pathway is known there are relatively few barriers to transfering it into a mass produced crop or yeast growing in a beer barrel in your basement.
The entire "kill off the crop" perspective probably has less than a ten year future. Beyond that one will be able to produce psychoactive substances in a variety of settings. It shifts from "lets eliminate the xxxyyyzzz crop" to lets test every single cornfield in America and/or lets invade every single basement to see if they have bioreactors (aka beer brewing barrels) that produce THC or Cocaine.
A real attempt to address this problem would not be focused on the production sources but would instead be focused on the causes for "demand". While it is important to limit the sources -- it ultimately isn't going to happen. (It is a task that is doomed to fail because technology advances *will* migrate around attempts to limit production.) Reduce the demand for the product and the sources of production will decrease as well. Simple economics.
Because I promise you, as someone who has studied microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology, as well as having founded seveeral biotech companies, attempts to control the "source" are doomed to fail.
Coca is becoming resistant to herbicide spraying, and soon it will be futile. It is a shame that this didn't happen in time to save Saskra Root. Coca-Cola tastes like ass since they ran out of it. Read more.
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