MARIJUANA-EATING FUNGUS: REALITY OR PIPE DREAM?

(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 law 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 called Fusarium oxysporum.

It is a plan that has some politicians and Florida drug enforcement
officials excited, and some environmentalists worried.

The fungus, a bioherbicide engineered specifically to attack plants
like marijuana, is otherwise harmless, said the Montana company,
Ag/Bio Con., that developed it.

"Is it safe, and does it work?" asked Jim McDonough, who was hired by
Gov. Jeb Bush earlier 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 McCaffrey,
the White House drug czar, said the fungus will not be used here until
it is tested in rigidly controlled conditions at a Florida test 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 all marijuana seized in the United States is taken
here -- much of it home-grown. Most years, drug agents destroy more
than 100,000 plants, and one year -- in 1992 -- they destroyed more
than 240,000 plants.

"With prudence and with care, make your choices," he said. "We'd be no
place if we put our head in the sand."

McDonough said he has not yet presented the plan to the
governor.

But Florida has seen its environment ravaged again and again by
supposedly harmless plants that thrived so well in a damp, hot climate
that they overwhelmed indigenous plants. So 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.

David Struhs, secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental
Protection, spelled out the dangers in a letter to McDonough in April.

"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.

He added, "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 living things behave
differently in Florida than almost anywhere else in this country.

Here 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 1920s to thwart soil erosion, has swallowed houses
and acres of roadside in Florida, growing a foot a day. Melaleuca
trees, planted decades ago to help drain the Everglades because they
suck up so much water, has infested hundreds of thousands of acres.