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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?"
..just as, ehm, potent?
Can drug dogs still smell it?
Starsky and Hutch surrender.
Someone alert Monsanto! The Columbian government is obviously infringing on their patents by allowing this plant to exist on their lands.
Just imagine all the lost revenues.
>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!
It's Colombia, not Columbia.
That's exactly what I was thinking about this one. napalm. Hard to be resistant to that.
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
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
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.
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.
I'm waiting for the creationists to explain how god did this one.
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
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.
HERE
The real question, imho, is will Monsanto try to collect royalties for the use of their genetic patent portfolio and IP?
It would be *really* funny if they sued the drug cartels for patent license violations.
I don't know who I dislike more, Monsanto or the Drug Cartels...
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
...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.
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.
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"
Now the War on Drugs can stop using those bit players (i.e. the CIA and the U.S. military) and move to a much more powerful attack squad: Monsanto and the U.S. intellectual property legal lobby. Those unfortunate Colombians are going to learn what Shock and Awe really mean.
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
Or the drug smugglers.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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!
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.
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
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...
I mean, They gotta sue somebody!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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
I have you know that Monsanto is comprised of legitimate businessmen!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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"
I'm waiting for the creationists to explain how god did this one.
;)
Obviously it was the work of satan! God was busy working to get GWB elected.
"As someone who has successfully quit cigarettes, alcohol, and cocaine"
GEORGE, IS THAT YOU???
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds !"
Oh, great. Just what we need: napalm resistant plants.
:(
I, for one, welcome our new leafy overlords....
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.
I think you mean, "...you can safely use it to kill weeds in your roundup-ready[TM] vegetable garden."
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
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"
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.
Just look at what happened to alcohol when it was decriminalized - the crime nearly completely left the production and distribution. The worst thing they do now is make bad commercials for the super bowl.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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"
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
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.
"Hi Doc...listen, I've always wanted to look like Keith Richards but, I'm afraid of plastic surgery...can you help me out?"
"Sure son...here's a prescription...."
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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
There's a third choice outside of genetic engineering or natural selection... Intentional-selection from random genetic variation.
.5%- struggle, survive and produce seed. Our peasant re-plants with those seeds.
Essentially, an impoverished peasant farmer is growing coca to sell to some narco-lords. A plane flies low over his 1,000 coca plants and devastates his crop with glyphosate. A few plants- perhaps
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again devastates his crop with glyphosate. This time, 10% of his plants struggle, survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again devastates his crop with glyphosate. This time, 50% of his plants survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again sprays his crop with glyphosate. This time, 95% of his plants survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again sprays his crop with glyphosate. This time, our peasant farmer gives the pilot the finger, but his crop is undamaged. Now, instead of selling coca, he lets his plants go to seed and sells his glyphosphate resistant variety to his neighbors.
It's not "natural selection"... it's intentional-selection-- and it's what farmers have been doing for millenia.
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.
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.
You don't think He was going to just sit around and watch people destroy His main source of cheap cocaine, do you?
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.