Congressman Mark Souder has been busy in his personal war on drugs. As well as fighting against the legalisation of cannabis for medical use (see below), the Indiana Republican has slipped a provision into a bill calling for the fungus Fusarium oxysporum to be used as a biological control agent against drug crops in foreign countries.
The CIA, however, has had moral doubts about using the fungus. In 2000, a CIA official told The New York Times that it was unsafe both for humans and for the environment: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 support using a product on a bunch of Colombian peasants that you wouldn鈥檛 use against a bunch of rednecks growing marijuana in Kentucky.鈥�
The Department of Agriculture and the Drug Enforcement Agency agree. Fusarium species are highly prone to mutation, so they can readily change hosts and infect plants they were not supposed to. This was the main reason Florida鈥檚 Department of Environmental Protection rejected the fungus in 1999 as a biocontrol agent for use on outdoor marijuana crops.
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The House of Representatives proposal to use F. oxysporum in biocontrol is not included in the Senate version of the bill, which concerns the office of the US 鈥渄rug czar鈥�, and a committee will now meet to decide on the final version.
Meanwhile, Bausch & Lomb recalled a contact-lens solution last week amid fears that it is associated with the spread of an eye disease across the US. The disease is caused by F. oxysporum.