U.S. Pushing Widspread Use Of Experimental "Drug Fungus" To Kill Pot Plants

by Erin Sullivan

HR 4300 is a bill that allots roughly $23 million for the development of soil-borne mycoherbicides that would kill crops used to produce marijuana, heroin and cocaine. The bill states that the Office of National Drug Control Policy should work in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Defense and "other appropriate agencies" to develop a 10-year master plan for the use of the fungi in the United States and South America.

The foreign fungi would be introduced to the soil, where they would damage the root systems of host plants and cripple drug crops before they could be harvested. Bill sponsors Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) and Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Florida) called the use of mycoherbicides a "silver bullet" in the war against drugs.

The Libertarian Party, however, issued a release last week that called the mycoherbicides being developed by the federal government "the political equivalent of athlete's foot fungus."

George Getz, press secretary for the party, said that although the federal government has insisted that the fungi will be harmless to other plants and animals, the plan could backfire.

Valuable cash crops such as tobacco and coffee beans, which have similar chemical alkaloids to the one that produces cocaine, could be wiped out. He also pointed out that the fungi could mutate or cause mutations in the poppy, cannabis and coca crops which could prove harmful to other native vegetations.

"Mr. McCollum, if it's not so dangerous, why are you not implanting it in Florida?" Getz asked, referring to the fact that the bill specifically targets the South American nations of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico as areas to test the fungi. "What we suspect they're doing with these foreign nations is using the carrot and the stick -- if you don't plant this fungus, we're going to cut off your funding."

Allen St. Pierre, spokesman for NORML, said the proposed fungi could also pose dangerous to human health. He points out that the fungi could alter the chemical composition of the host plants to create toxic compounds. And he indicated that it would be impossible to keep track of drugs created from the toxic plants, because there is no government oversight of the illegal drug trade.

"In 1977 we sued the federal government to stop spraying [poisonous herbicides] on marijuana," St. Pierre said. "The principal was the same. Introducing these foreign chemicals and agents into the product is dangerous. We found out that [because drugs] are not regulated, they were still packaged and sold with the poisons. It wasn't until children of well-to-do kids started taking it and getting sick that people started to say something about it."

But St. Pierre said that so far, very few organizations or agencies in the United States have spoken out about the dangers of HR 4300.

"I can say that since we were the first organization to break the news on this, we have received so many inquiries, not from people in the U.S., but from people all over the world," St. Pierre lamented. "One professor in Australia e-mailed us and said he thought the U.S. germ warfare agereements with the U.N. would preclude them from using this in foreign nations."

However, he pointed out that most members of Congress do not seem concerned about either the health dangers or potential illegalities of this bill -- only 39 members of Congress voted against the bill -- and Congress should expect to receive a progress report from the Office of National Drug Control Policy by March 1. St. Pierre said it doesn't surprise him a bit.

"Whenever you say anything about drugs in Congress," he said, "Everybody jumps on board. Reefer madness is bipartisan."