Boy, you can't say Mark Souder isn't serious about fighting the drug war. He actually wants to test a fungus, Fusarium oxysporum, to see if it can destroy the plants in Colombia and Afghanistan used to make cocaine and heroin. There's just one tiny little problem:
However, the nation's drug czar, John Walters, and his staff said it's possible that the fungus would not only destroy coca plants and poppies - which are made into cocaine and heroin_ but also ruin the soil for other crops.
Fusarium is a naturally occurring fungus that can cause many plant diseases, and each strain of the fungus is thought to attack only one kind of plant. But skeptics say it's unclear whether a fungus that kills coca plants would spread to other plants or even harm humans.
"It's an organism that could mutate into another organism that kills everything," said Thomas Riley, spokesman for Walters' office. "The concern is if it mutates into something else, you've unleashed it on the wild."
Be careful when you mess with Mother Nature. Where I grew up, we have this little plant called kudzu (some of my relatives called it "kush vine"). It was imported from Japan and planted enthusiastically here to prevent erosion. The problem was that it just kept growing, and there seemed to be no way to kill the stuff. You left your house for a two-week vacation, and your back yard would practically be overrun with it. If anybody ever figures out how to make a narcotic out of kudzu, we'd put the Colombia cartels out of business in a heartbeat.
A little chink in Souder's philosophical armor, by the way. He has said consistently, including in his ads and in meetings with our editorial board, that he will keep fighting the drug scourge, even though skeptics say we can never get rid of all the drugs, so what's the point? But he has also said, about illegal immigration, that we have to figure out how to deal with the 11 or 12 million already here, because it would simply be unrealistic to think we could just round that many people up. I take that to mean that he thinks violating drug laws is serious but violating immigration laws is not. My life would certainly be a lot easier if I got to choose which laws to take seriously and which not to.
