From: Involuntary 
Subject: [illusions] (Fwd) - CNN/Time: Attack of the killer fungus,  The war on drugs in Colombia is starting to look more and more like Vietnam
Date: 7 Jul 2000 02:35:37 -0400
To: illusions@beyond-the-illusion.com

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http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/americas/07/06/fungus7_6.a.tm/index.html

Yikes! Attack of the killer fungus is a moldy plan
July 6, 2000
Web posted at: 2:08 PM EDT (1808 GMT)


By Tony Karon

The war on drugs in Colombia is starting to look more and more
like Vietnam every day, and not only because the U.S. is now
advocating defoliation.  The New York Times that Washington has
leaned on Colombia to begin field-testing the fungus Fusarium
oxysporum for use in eliminating coca crops, as the price for the
billion-dollar aid package Washington is sending to that nation's
military.

Human rights organizations had questioned the wisdom of seeking to
combat drug cultivation by beefing up an army with a deplorable
human rights record in a decades-old civil war, but it's
environmentalists who're up in arms over the Fusarium proposal.
The U.S. is proposing blanketing much of Colombia with a fungus
whose planned use against marijuana fields in Florida was stopped
out of environmental concerns, and the Colombian authorities have
reportedly been similarly reluctant to apply a solution whose
wider impact remains unknown.

More important, though, Fusarium is unlikely to stop the flow of
drugs into the U.S. First, biologists point out, even if the
fungus proved effective against coca plants in Colombia, it would
be a relatively simple matter for that country's narco-traffickers
to genetically alter their plants to make them resistant to the
herbicide.  But even if the fungus managed to munch its way
through the entire Colombian coca crop, the economics of the drug
trade dictate that the traffickers would simply set up shop
elsewhere, leaving Colombia to deal with any ecological
consequences.

After all, as long as there's a demand for cocaine on the streets
and in the boardrooms of the United States, it's going to be worth
somebody's while to produce it.  Like Vietnam, then, a war on
drugs that doesn't address the root cause of the problem -- that
Americans are prepared to spend billions of dollars every year on
illegal substances -- may be unwinnable.  A number of congressmen
tried to make the same point when the Colombia aid package was
voted upon, urging that some of the money be reallocated for
drug-treatment programs in the U.S. But that sounds a little
wussy-ish compared with the martial tones of a "War on Drugs" --
even an unwinnable one.

Copyright © 2000 Time Inc.






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