David Marshall wrote:
> The boom of molecular biology may very well throw drug enforcement for
> a loop. For a simple example, assume that a drug-friendly biologist
> isolated the gene for THC, and spliced it into some other kind of
> plant. The result is a fruit or vegitable which has THC in it, which
> will make consumers high, but which is most likely very hard to
> distinguish from the normal version of that fruit. This process could
> be performed for any kind of drug product for which a gene could be
> isolated. In reality, it's a bit more complicated than that, but
> that's the concept.
Why, that was indeed done. I printed the news article (CNN or some
such) but can't find either the printout or the reference, so what
follows is short on details. I read about it maybe a year ago.
A scientist in California let his son borrow his new mini-van. One of
the son's friends left some seeds or butts or something in the van,
which led to the van being confiscated. The scientist was pissed at
the authorities for this theft, so he spliced THC genes into orange
seeds. He sent out packets of seeds to anyone who asked. He didn't keep
records, but thinks he sent out fifty or a hundred packets of ten. The
new orange trees would be identical to normal orange trees, and in
particular indistinguishable from the air, but the oranges contained
THC. One orange would be equivalent to one joint.
The Feds and CA narcos attempted to come down on him, to no avail. They
couldn't find any law he had violated. (I expect that shocking
shortcoming in the law has been rectified.) Nevertheless, he folded and
agreed not to send out any more seeds. But there are still hundreds out
there...
> I guess they would ban genetics education then. I'm surprised that
> they haven't done something about the proliferation of dangerous
> chemistry knowledge in educational instututions and libraries yet.
Yet another thing that science fiction predicted: control over
information flow for some narrow, "socially valuable" purpose
eventually becomes control over all information flow.
--
Steve Furlong, Computer Condottiere Have GNU, will travel
518-374-4720 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
