According to the New York Times, the Bush administration is pressuring the Afghan government to allow
aerial spraying of synthetic herbicides in rural areas. The United States wants to eradicate Afghan farmers’ harvest of opium poppies, which supply
the raw material for 90 percent of the world’s heroin, and help fund the Taliban insurgency. But Afghan officials are resisting the idea, in part because of fears that the chemicals will contaminate the Afghan water supply. (The chemical that the U.S. wants to use is glyphosate,
which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns can cause lung congestion, kidney
damage and reproductive problems with sufficient exposure.)
But the U.S. government ultimately may deploy a more technologically advanced — and potentially even riskier — solution to destroy the poppy fields in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has been working on using both natural and genetically engineered organisms to kill drug crops such as opium poppies and coca, the source of cocaine, according to The Sunshine
Project, an international organization opposed to the use of genetic engineering in warfare. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration tried to persuade Colombia to allow use of a U.S.-developed strain of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum against coca fields, but field tests of the organism were halted after international protests. In 2000, U.S. scientists published a study
on two fungi with opium-killing properties. Asia Times reported in 2002 that the United Nations Drug
Control Program, with research support and funding from the United States, had conducted tests of the effect of the fungus Pleospora papaveracea on opium poppies at the Institute of Genetics in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (a former site of Soviet biological-weapons research). In 2005, Indiana GOP Congress members Dan Burton and Mark Souder, the then-chairman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, advocated a biological war on drugs,
which potentially would include both naturally occurring and genetically manipulated organisms. "We spend millions of dollars every year on counter-narcotic efforts, including drug-crop eradication and interdiction, especially in our joint efforts in Colombia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, yet the flow of illegal and lethal narcotics continues to be a major problem in our country," stated congressman Burton. "The advent of mycoherbicides and other counter-narcotic alternatives offers us the possibility to cut off
the source of these drugs literally at their roots."
The Sunshine Project’s scientists, however, warn that such tactics are "a recipe for environmental disaster." They point to the risk that drug-destroying organisms will harm other plants and insects as well, and estimate that the anti-opium fungus’s spores would persist in the soil for as long as 40 years,
making the spread of the fungus difficult to control. In addition, they say that a biowar against drugs could
lead to a rise in life-threatening fungal infections among humans with compromised immune systems — such as patients in Afghan hospitals. Worse yet, a scientific paper written by two Sunshine Project scientists warns that "these biological agents are lowering the political threshold for the use of biological weapons and are likely to have tremendous environmental and health impacts. The pursuit of crop-killing fungi as weapons would be a further slide down a slippery slope that, by following the same logic, could easily lead to the use of other plant pathogens, animal pathogens or even non-lethal biological weapons against humans."
There’s also the possibility that drug traffickers could strike back with biowarfare of their own. Wired
News reported in 2004 that Colombian cocaine traffickers may have obtained genetically engineered herbicide-resistant coca plants to thwart the U.S. anti-drug effort.
So, should the U.S. wage a biowar against drugs in Afghanistan (or anywhere else)? Express your opinion here.
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