The End of Heroin

Submitted by Rupert George on Thu, 13/05/2010 - 14:22


The UNODC has announced that a fungus is killing the Afghan opium crop. Maria
Antonio Costas has said that the fungus is infecting about a half of the Afghani
opium crop, an economic disaster for Afghan farmers. The area’s most affected are
those were the insurgency against NATO is strongest.

The farmers think that NATO have infected their fields with the fungus, Maria Antonio
Costas denies this. However in 2000 the BBC reported that the US and the UK had
funded research into a an anti –opium fungus by an Uzbek scientist Professor
Abdukarimov and a British scientist Mike Greaves. The work was overseen by the
United Nations Drug Control Program. The UK made a £100,000 donation to this
work, in 2002, The Times quoted a British government source as saying "whole fields
withered and died" in tests of the fungus in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.  "It is a potent
weapon.  We're just waiting for the go-ahead," the source said.  According to a
confidential Foreign Office note cited by the Times, "Opium ... will be destroyed. ... It
is possible to imagine Afghanistan without a drug industry for the first time in a
decade."

The US backed SCOPE (Strategy for Coca and Opium Poppy Elimination) intended to
use fungi to attack both opium and coca was voted against by the UN general
assembly in 1998 but the US, UK and United Nations Drug Control Program continue
to research these agents. The tests of the effect of the fungus Pleospora
papaveracea on opium poppies were conducted at the Institute of Genetics in
Tashkent, Uzbekistan (a former site of Soviet biological-weapons research). The anti-
coca fungus, Fusarium Oxysporum f. sp. Erythroxyli, was discovered accidentally
when it wiped out a test plot of coca being grown in Hawaii. The US Department of
Agriculture (USDA) developed the strain “Isolate EN-4,” which is intended to
eradicate the coca plant, and which has been pushed for use in Colombia.

Does this mean the end of heroin? The plant will adapt fairly quickly but it will wreck
havoc with the livelihoods of Afghan farmers, however if this has been done once it is
likely that scientist will have the potential to do it again, thus making the growing of
opium poppy more difficult and leading an an 'arms race' between the plant and the
scientists, which the plant is always likely to win. Although this will lead to the use of
more and more dangerous biological agents, there is a huge risk of the fungus
jumping species and destroying food crops.

The ability to make synthetic opiates has jumped forward in the last year so there is
little risk to the manufacture of opiate pain killers in the long term, but the use of an
infection like this to destroy a plant is a very risky way of tackling the failure of the
global drug control regime.

In the short term it will push up the value of heroin. This will have to effects
increasing the value of existing stock piles and the street price of heroin, increasing
the likelihood that users will inject rather than smoke the drug. And thus increasing
the chance of the transmission of HIV and other blood borne viruses.