Drug war latest score (Mother Nature 1 Government 0)
We have some good news and some bad news. First the good news - the US Coast Guard has captured 37 tonnes of cocaine in the last two months and 110 tonnes in the last year, a figure similar to previous years. This means that the US is intercepting between 10% and 20% of the global supply each year.
Now the bad news - the Columbian cartels have developed an improved "Roundup Ready"® Coca plant which is also a higher yielding plant.
A toxicologist, Camilo Uribe, who studied the coca, said: "The quality and percentage of hydrochloride from each leaf is much better, between 97 and 98 per cent. A normal plant does not get more than 25 per cent, meaning that more drugs and of a higher purity can be extracted."
Experts estimate that the drugs traffickers spent £60 million to develop the new plant, using strains from Peru and crossbreeding them with potent Colombian varieties, as well as engaging in genetic engineering
More on the latter and its implications for the "war on drugs" in Wired which also this ironic comment:
But experts in herbicide resistance suspect that there is another, more intriguing possibility: The coca plant may have been genetically modified in a lab. The technology is fairly trivial. In 1996, Monsanto commercialized its patented Roundup Ready soybean - a genetically modified plant impervious to glyphosate. The innovation ushered in an era of hyperefficient soybean production: Farmers were able to spray entire fields, killing all the weeds and leaving behind a thriving soybean crop. The arrival of Roundup Ready coca would have a similar effect - except that in this case, it would be the US doing the weed killing for the drug lords.
However if you read the entire article it looks like this time the coca was not GM, just produced by natural selection so maybe that is slightly good news although as the arcicle concludes it probably isn't
The reality is that a smoothly functioning selective-breeding system is a greater threat to US antidrug efforts. Certainly government agents can switch to Fusarium and enjoy some short-term results. But after a few years - during which legal crops could be devastated - a new strain of Fusarium-resistant coca would likely emerge, one just as robust as the glyphosate-resistant strain.
The drug war (as far as Cocaine goes at least) is lost - we might as well legalise the damn thing, pay the farmers properly and regulate its sale in the same was as we do for other intoxicants. As this, possibly biased, article says, illegal drugs are funding rebellions and terrorists throughout Latin America. If the Bush administration wants to be tough on terrorists and tough on the causes of terror then perhaps the best thing it could do would be to legalise drugs