Scientist David Sands calls the microscopic life form a “silver bullet,” a sure-fire weapon that would win the war on drugs. Florida Congressman Bill McCollum used the same words to describe it in 1998, when he proposed that the United States spend $23 million dollars for continued study of mycoherbicides—fungi that kill plants—for use in the drug war.[1] The fungus at issue is a mutant strain of Fusarium oxysporum, and the plant it kills is coca. It was first discovered in 1988 on dying coca plants at a U.S. Department of Agriculture-owned research station on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
Now the United States is pressing Colombia to give the fungus a key role in coca fumigation. Early last year, with official U.S. sanction, Sands reportedly tried to sell Colombian President Pastrana on the idea of using C-130 cargo planes to bombard coca fields with fusarium-laden grass seed—a product to be supplied by Ag/Bio Con, a Montana company of which Sands, a professor of plant pathology at Montana State University, is vice-president.[2]
So far, the Colombian government has refused to sign off on the program and many observers are far from sharing in the official U.S. enthusiasm about it. Colombian scientists have petitioned their government to continue withholding approval for fusarium use in that country. Researcher Jeremy Bigwood and journalist Sharon Stevenson have dedicated an entire Website, www.mycoherbicide.net, to documenting concerns that the fungus could cause widespread environmental damage and threaten human health.[3]
A huge number of plants are susceptible to infection by one strain or another of Fusarium oxysporum—U.S. gardeners may be most familiar with the strains that frequently attack tomatoes and cucumbers. There are hundreds of strains, and each one can infect one, or at most a handful, of plant species. But the fungus mutates easily, and a slight mutation could allow it to infect a different group of plants. Humans can also contract fusarium infections. These are difficult to treat and frequently fatal, especially in those with damaged immune systems.
Despite these known dangers, using fusarium to get rid of drug plants has long been on the U.S. agenda; the DEA was funding research on marijuana and opium poppy-killing strains in the 1970s. In 1999, Ag/Bio Con tried to sell Florida fusarium for use in a marijuana eradication program, but state environmental officials nixed the plan out of concern that that the strain, which could supposedly affect only marijuana, might mutate and attack other plants.[4]
Although the U.S. desire to use the fungus for coca control is now far from secret, controversy rages about a number of murky issues with important implications: Was the program originally cooked up by the CIA? Have the CIA or other U.S. agencies already tested or applied the fungus in Andean coca fields, or did recent fusarium outbreaks in the region occur naturally? Is the particular strain used in the program one which mutated in Hawaii, or was it transferred to Hawaii from Peru on imported coca plants?
Bigwood says there is evidence that “by 1983 at the latest” the CIA was underwriting anti-coca fusarium research in Hawaii and Peru, work which Bigwood says Sands and his colleagues repeated later under more respectable USDA auspices and then reported in scientific journals. If, as Bigwood believes may be the case, the CIA did test coca-killing fusarium in Peru’s Huallaga Valley in the early and mid 1980s, that experiment was singularly unsuccessful.[5] Although scattered fusarium infections were then reported in the valley, these did nothing to brake the rapid expansion of Huallaga coca production which continued into the next decade.
It was not until 1988, however, that the researchers in Hawaii discovered a fusarium mutation they described as especially “virulent” and “highly aggressive.” It killed coca faster than other strains—in as little as seven months as compared to several years.[6]
Two years later, in May 1990, the Peruvian newspaper Tiempo reported Huallaga farmers’ suspicions that “biological arms” were being used against their coca. The farmers described low-flying planes spewing a strange smoke; they also reported serious, but at first unidentified, fungal infections in their coca fields. Lab tests of soil and plant samples showed residues of the coca herbicide tebuthiuron—aerial eradication was then supposed to be on hold in Peru—and the fungus was identified as fusarium oxysporum. Tiempo quoted one local investigator who considered the fungus more of a threat to local coca farmers than herbicides which had to be applied to each individual field; the fungus could be spread easily from farm to farm on farmers’ boots, by insects, or even the wind.[7]
By 1996, Huallaga coca production had fallen drastically—a decline that was attributed to the continuing fusarium epidemic combined with massive manual eradication and aid which induced farmers to switch to legal crops. The following year Colombia officially replaced Peru as the world’s leading coca producer.
There is still no definitive evidence that any of the Huallaga outbreaks were the result of a purposeful infection, or that fusarium has been, or is being purposely applied to coca fields elsewhere. According to Bigwood, such evidence would be difficult and expensive to come by. But the ease with which even natural infections spread continues to fuel speculation and rumor of secret applications.[8] And although the mutant strain found in Hawaii was not, as some early critical reports had it, the result of genetic engineering, scientists can select or even create new, more powerful forms of this readily mutable fungus. Ag/Bio Con boasts of its “development of novel virulence enhancement of mycoherbicides.”[9]
Though U.S. officials have long been fond of talking about their “war on drugs,” they bristle when critics refer to the fusarium program as “biological warfare” rather than “biological control.” That’s because it is a violation of international law to use biological agents as weapons of war. It is also illegal to introduce pathogens to an environment where they don’t occur naturally. That is why officials insist that the fusarium strain they want to use in Colombia is one which first appeared in the region rather than in Hawaii. Despite their public relations concerns, however, Bush Administration officials continue to promote the program as essential to drug war victory. They have reportedly included money for further mycoherbicide research in their latest drug war budget, but this time around the funding will apparently be routed through Pentagon budget lines, rather than those of civilian agencies like USDA, and the amount has not been disclosed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JoAnn Kawell is the author of Going to the Source: A History of the War on Cocaine (forthcoming). She will be NACLA’s next editor.
NOTES
1. For Sands, see http://jeremybigwood.net/Lectures/GWU-WOLA-JB/jbs_gwu6.htm. For McCullom, see Press release, July 22, 1998, office of Bill McCullom, 8th District, Florida.
2. Sands and colleagues have made MSU/Bozeman a center of drug plant mycoherbicide research carried out under contract from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
3. See also Martin Jelsma, “Fungus vs. Coca: UNDCP and the Biological War on Drugs in Colombia” and Jim Hogshire, “Biological Roulette: The Drug War’s Fungal Solution,” Covert Action Quarterly, Spring 1998.
4. Maia Szalavitz, Feed Magazine, September 12,1999, www.feedmag.com/essay/es243lofi.html; Rick Bragg, “Marijuana-Eating Fungus Seen as Potent Weapon, but at What Cost?” The New York Times, July 27, 1999.
5. Bigwood: “My position is that if Fusarium was applied in Peru, it was done so secretly by the CIA in the early and mid-1980’s, and has since spread. I have no hard information on whether other things have been sprayed since the U.S. [chemical herbicide] spraying test program ceased, but, I must recognize that it is possible.”
http://jeremybigwood.net/Lectures/GWU-WOLA-JB/jbs_gwu4.htm
6. David C. Sands et al., “Characterization of a Vascular Wilt of Erythroxylum Coca Caused by Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. erythrosyli Forma Specialis Nova,” Plant Disease, May 1997. The researchers date the discovery to 1988, Bigwood has said it occurred in 1987.
7. “Estados Unidos ensaya armas biologicas en Peru,” Tiempo (Lima), May 14, 1990.
8. Last year, for instance, Bigwood and Stevenson collected “reports of Fusarium spraying emanating from the Sucumbíos region of Ecuador on the Colombian border.” They investigated these by telephone and later by an on-site visit and determined these to be untrue.
9. Ag/Bio Con promotional document boasts of the company’s Mycoherbicide Program for the Elimination of Illicit Drug Crops, March 25, 1999 p.20 http://www.montananorml.org/msudocs/agbiocon/display.phtml?image.
