MARIJUANA FUNGUS IS A RECKLESS IDEA

Even though everyone knows by now that smoking kills one out of every three
people who take it up, millions still do it. Others suffer the tortures of
the damned trying and failing to quit. The politicians won't take it on in
earnest because it's just as much a cash crop for them as for the people
who grow and sell tobacco.

I got to thinking not long ago how sweet it would be if some crusading
scientist came up with a voracious virus or blight with a genetically
engineered affinity for Nicotiana tabacum and its eastern cousin, N.
rustica. As the disease spread worldwide, cigarettes would become as rare
as American chestnuts, which were lost to a natural pest that has defied
control for nearly a century. Tobacco could be grown, if at all, only in
hermetically sealed hothouses, at a price only the wealthiest cigar
aficionados could afford.

But such a plot, I had to admit, would be grossly unfair to the families
whose livelihood has come from tobacco for generations. It would be wildly
reckless as well, given the fact that diseases cannot be trusted not to
mutate. HIV, after all, was once just a monkey virus.

So I figured that while the Great Tobacco Blight might be great science
fiction, that's as far as it should go.

But before I could get around to writing it, life stole a march on art. It
turns out that Florida is seriously considering biological warfare against
marijuana.

I heard this news on vacation as I was driving through the heart of kudzu
country northeast of Atlanta. As we Southerners know, the people who argue
whether the world will end in fire or ice are both wrong. It is kudzu that
will swallow the earth. As my colleagues at this paper have been trying to
warn Florida's anti-drug zealots, kudzu is just one of many biological
scourges that were deliberately brought to these shores in the uninformed
belief that they would do some good.

Those who are eager to propagate the marijuana fungus, Fusarium oxysporum,
should first spend a day in a kudzu patch to see for themselves how nature
can run wild. By nightfall, there'd be no trace of them except for vague
green mounds. (And what a splendid way to see the last of U.S. Rep. Bill
McCollum!)

Interestingly, the BBC's World News Service, which we heard on Georgia
public radio, gave the pot plot a much longer, detailed airing than did
National Public Radio. It's not just that the Brits find the American pot
paranoia to be vaguely amusing; Europe is also acutely more sensitive to
the potential dangers of bioengineering. We Americans, on the other hand,
go berserk over irradiated foods, which the Europeans take so much for
granted that fresh milk is sold in unrefrigerated cartons.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Florida drug czar Jim McDonough and others
who say they don't wish to unleash the Strangelovian fungus before it is
proved safe -- that is, harmful only to pot plants. The trouble is whether
any short-term laboratory experiment can show with reliable certainty that
a killer fungus will not, someday, run wild to the detriment of legitimate
crops.

But the more important question is whether this is something we should be
doing even with utter confidence that it would work. It is not. The
political and moral implications are too profound, too ominous. We should
no more countenance biological warfare against plant life than against
human beings.

To spray unwanted plants with a topical, non-propagating chemical such as
Paraquat is one thing, although even that had unintended disastrous
consequences to humans when the chemical happened to be Agent Orange. But
to unloose something that keeps on killing in places where it was not put
would be even more reckless than sowing a countryside with land mines. It
is something that international convention should urgently prohibit.

Let's not forget that even cannabis and the opium poppy have legitimate
medicinal uses. In March, a government-sponsored study concluded that
marijuana is effective in controlling the symptoms of such lethal diseases
as cancer and AIDS. The hemp plant, cannabis' close relative and a likely
first victim of any fungus mutation, is a legal source of fiber in more
than 20 other countries. The poppy, of course, is the source of morphine,
still the world's painkiller of choice, as well as of illegal drugs. The
problems with these plants is not that they exist but that they are abused.

Cannabis today. Tomorrow, what? There are already too many people in the
world with enough means and malice to declare biological warfare on
America's food supply. To set them such an example has got to be the
dumbest thing we could do.