The Drug War's Fungal
"Solution" in Latin America
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"Andean Seminar" Lecture Series
sponsored by GWU and WOLA
Friday, December 8
Jeremy Bigwood
So, how did Fusarium, with such a known history of toxicity come to be proposed for a massive application throughout the Amazon basin by US government representatives?
In 1964, a coca wilt epidemic broke out in the Coca-Coca coca research plantation on a Hawaiian Island. During this time, dead plants were removed from the field and immediately replaced with healthy seeds or seedlings. Many years later, in the 1980's Fusarium oxysporum was identified as the wilt organism. Its dispersal throughout the research plots eventually resulted in the termination of the breeding project.
During the 1970s, I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to work with Tim Plowman when he was still at Harvard. Dr. Plowman eventually wrote the Monograph (the "Bible") on the genus Erythroxylum, the genus to which coca belongs.
| Plowman knew, of course, about the problems in Hawaii, and hypothesized that the disease was fungal in origin. But, he wanted to know if the disease was caused by a contaminant on the seeds and seedlings from Latin America, or was it something that had endemic to Hawaii and then mutated -changed hosts, and started to chew on Coca-Cola’s coca plants. At the time, Plowman was sending seeds and seedlings from Latin America to restock the plantation. In 1974, he diverted to me some of the same seeds and |
Coca seedlings, 1974 |
| seedlings that were to be sent to Hawaii for cultivation. | |||
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Plowman did this to determine
if the seeds and seedlings developed the coca wilt disease when grown in
other places besides Hawaii.
All seeds and seedlings grew to maturity in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Based upon the fact that all of the seeds and seedlings that were grown in Hawaii became contaminated and wilted, Plowman hypothesized that the fungus in Hawaii is indigenous to Hawaii and just mutated to attack coca, and was not brought in with the seedlings, as some researchers still allege today. The reason that this is important is that |
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proponents of Fusarium like to believe that the disease was Peruvian in origin -- that it came on the seeds to Hawaii-- and therefore could be reapplied in the Amazon basin as a "natural, local" disease, thus circumventing any arguments that its importation from the US would be in violation of laws regulating the importation of pathogens.
Also in the mid-1970s in the Bay Area, A.H. McCain and D.C. Hildebrand of U.C. Berkeley were working with another strain of Fusarium oxysporum as a mycoherbicide against Cannabis funded by the DEA. And indeed, at the time there was speculation in botanical and mycological circles that Fusarium oxysporum was also responsible for the epidemic in Hawaii. The Cannabis work proved to be inconclusive, and because of the Paraquat scare at the time the work was phased out, only to be taken up later by other scientists.
Although they deny it, by 1983 at the latest, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was funding research on Fusarium and coca, in both Hawaii and Peru. CIA-contracted scientists isolated Fusarium oxysporum from coca. What else did they do? We do not know. Indeed, determining how far they got on this project has been one of the more difficult aspects of this investigation. Did they merely isolate the strain from Hawaii? Or were they also able to reproduce its spores, come up with an application formulation and apply it in Peru? CIA has not been forthcoming, either through the FOIA or during interviews of their press officers.
In 1984, a Fusarium epidemic started in Peru, according to David Sands, the scientist who later repeated the CIA’s clandestine work openly for the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA [photo]. Sands and others say that the epidemic in Peru was "natural." Again, the very year after my sources place the CIA-paid scientists with Fusarium and coca in Hawaii and Peru, an epidemic starts in the Huallaga Valley! An amazing coincidence!
By 1986, the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA was openly developing biological agents to kill coca, including moths and fungus. The USDA/ARS program was to repeat the clandestine work of the CIA, "legitimizing" it so that it would no longer be considered clandestine, and could be openly Congressionally funded in the future.
By 1987, the first Peruvian press reports documented that something was attacking the coca in the Upper Huallaga Valley. What it was, they did not know at the time.
In 1987 also, USDA/ARS took over the Hawaiian site. During the next year, Sands isolated a strain of Fusarium oxysporum which he called "EN-4" from E. novogranatense growing in Hawaii. The fact that it was first isolated from a species other than Erythroxylum coca illustrates some of the problems of mycoherbicide selectivity. According to their proponents, mycoherbicidal strains, or "formae specialis" of Fusarium oxysporum will only attack certain species of plants, and this is cited as "evidence" of their safety, although in British studies using EN-4, it attacked other species of plants quite unrelated to coca.
Because this strain was isolated from E. novogranatense and not E. coca, some scientists developed an entirely novel and unheard of concept based entirely on wishful thinking: to wit, that this mycoherbicide is "genus specific," instead of "species specific." However, there are over two hundred species of coca at risk, and of these only four produce cocaine in amounts large enough for extraction. Some of these other species have medicinal and other uses. Thus, by the scientists’ own "genus specific" definition, the EN-4 strain would also attack all of these! So, it could not be considered to be so specific!
By 1989, the scientists researching Fusarium knew about the problem of Fusarium in immunocompromised subjects. In a letter to DEA on March 10, 1989, one of them states: "this fungus is only a problem in immunocompromised patients." Fusarium, not just the mycotoxins it produces --can be very dangerous and infect immunocompromised animals, including humans. And how do we define "immunocompromised?" AIDS patients, certainly, but also undernourished people, even people with bad colds, and definitely people fleeing enemies in a war - the Colombian situation. All of these could risk becoming infected if saturated with the constantly mutating fungus under those conditions. Even in first-world hospitals, immunocompromised patients with Fusarium infections have a less than 50% chance of survival. One medical paper reads: "Fusarium in the foot: Remove the foot!"
