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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.
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.
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.
I'm waiting for the creationists to explain how god did this one.
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
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"
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
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!
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
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.
Oh, great. Just what we need: napalm resistant plants.
:(
I, for one, welcome our new leafy overlords....
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
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"
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.
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.
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