Marijuana-Eating Fungus Seen as Potent Weapon, but at What Cost?
By Rick Bragg
Miami -- For decades, the hard part for drug agents stalking Florida's marijuana growers was finding their crop. The growers weave their plants among corn stalks and even tomato vines to foil aerial searches. In swamps, growers make berms out of muck and chicken wire and plant their crop, leaving fat, black water moccasins to stand guard.
Hidden in Florida's lush landscape, the camouflaged marijuana plants often foiled the small army of officers, helicopters and drug-sniffing dogs.
Now, the new head of the state's Office of Drug Control hopes to kill Florida's lucrative marijuana business in the very ground in which it thrives, by someday dusting suspected areas with a marijuana-eating, soil-borne fungus, Fusarium oxysporum. It is a plan that has some politicians and Florida drug enforcement officials excited, and some environmentalists very worried.
The fungus, a bioherbicide engineered specifically to attack plants like marijuana, is otherwise harmless, said Ag/Bio Con, the Montana company that developed it.
"Is it safe, and does it work?" asked Jim McDonough, who was hired by Gov. Jeb Bush this year to head Florida's Office of Drug Control.
"I've heard some of the top scientists in the country say, 'Yes.' " But McDonough, who served as Director of Strategy for Barry R. McCaffrey, the White House drug czar, said the fungus would not be used here until it was tested in rigidly controlled conditions at a Florida site.
"When you deal with science, you deal with the cost of advancing and what is the cost of not advancing," said McDonough, who pointed out that 47 percent of the marijuana seized in the United States is taken here -- and much of it is home-grown. Most years, drug agents destroy more than 100,000 plants, and one year, 1992, they destroyed more than 240,000 plants.
"With prudence and with care, make your choices," he said.
McDonough said he has not yet presented the plan to Bush.
But in Florida, a state that has seen its environment ravaged by supposedly harmless plants that thrived so well in a damp, hot climate that they overwhelmed indigenous plants, some environmentalists say introducing the fungus is risky, that it could mutate and cause disease, not only in wild plants but in crops as well.
"I personally do not like the idea of messing with mother nature," said Bill Graves, senior biologist at the University of Florida Research Center in Homestead. "I believe that if this fungus is unleashed for this kind of problem, it's going to create its own problems. If it isn't executed effectively, it's going to target and kill rare and endangered plants."
David Struhs, Secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, spelled out the dangers in a letter to McDonough dated April 6, 1999.
"Fusarium species," he wrote, "are capable of evolving rapidly. Mutagenicity is by far the most disturbing factor in attempting to use a Fusarium species as a bioherbicide.
"It is difficult, if not impossible," he wrote, "to control the spread of Fusarium species."
The mutated fungi can cause disease in a large number of crops, including tomatoes, peppers, flowers, corn and vines, he wrote, and are "normally considered a threat to farmers as a pest, rather than as a pesticide. Fusarium species are more active in warm soils and can stay resident in the soil for years. Their longevity and enhanced activity under Florida conditions are of concern, as this could lead to an increased risk of mutagenicity."
What that means, say environmentalists, is that it is hot here much of the time, and living things behave differently in Florida than almost anywhere else in this country.
"In principle, I am very supportive of using biological agents against narcotic plants," said Raghavan Charudattan, professor of plant pathology and weed science at the University of Florida. "This needs to be researched well or it could lead to great danger."
State officials have agreed to quarantine testing of the fungus -- at a facility outside Gainesville usually used for, among other things, studying citrus canker, a catastrophic plant disease that has ruined whole orchards -- and for now any use of the fungus is probably years away.
But McDonough has some powerful allies, including Representative Bill McCollum, a Republican from Longwood, Fla. McDonough is planning to try to obtain part of a $23-million Congressional allocation for research in eradicating plants like marijuana, and having an ally like McCollum, as well as some Republican fund-raisers who back the idea, could be helpful.
In Peru, angry farmers have recently accused the United States of using a soil fungus to destroy coca in the Upper Huallaga Valley, saying that fungus has spread to banana, yucca, tangerine and other food crops, according to The Miami Herald.
American officials, while acknowledging in June that they had spent $14 million on research to develop such biological agents against poppy, coca and marijuana, denied the charges.
In Florida, history has taught scientists to be cautious of introducing any foreign, living thing into the environment. While pythons as long as pickup trucks have occasionally been found under houses in South Florida, most of the problems have been with vegetable matter.
Kudzu, a Chinese vine that has grown rampant in the South since its introduction in the 1920's to thwart soil erosion, has swallowed houses and acres of roadside in Florida, as it grows a foot a day. Melaleuca trees, planted decades ago to help drain the Everglades because they suck up so much water, have infested hundreds of thousands of acres.
Jerry Brooks, assistant director of the state Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Water Resources, said the difference between those plants and the fungus is that the state has learned to be careful.
"Mistakes made in the past," Brooks said, "make sure proper precautions are being taken."
"They were not tested," he said of the infamous plants.
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Carl