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Dear Mr. President: Lifetime Batteries for Your BullhornDear Mr. President: You Say Those Who Caused 9/11 Would Hear From Us? Mycoherbicides are naturally occurring fungi; not chemicals, but living organisms that attack and kill a target plant. They are used to control undesired pest-plants such as noxious weeds and illicit narcotics producing plants. Mycoherbicides have significant advantages over chemical control. First, mycoherbicides are host specific, only attacking the target plant. Second, many mycoherbicides survive in the soil, preventing future establishment of a noxious weed or cultivation of a narcotic plant. It is important to note that a mycoherbicide will not cause a plant to become extinct, but will greatly reduce yield and render cultivation uneconomical. In other words, in terms of major terrorism financing sources, a mycoherbicide can prevent the cultivation of an unwanted narcotic producing plant, denying revenue to criminals, and can do so for extended periods of time; decades or even centuries! It is also environmentally friendly. In the past, narcotics advocates have objected that a mycoherbicide will kill untargeted organisms: other plants, bacteria, animals or humans. This inference is provably false. Most plant pathogenic fungi are host-specific and only attack a single plant species or several closely related plant species. Mycoherbicides are chosen because they are target-specific and have been extensively evaluated to confirm their host range and environmental safety. Modern DNA technology enables unequivocal identification of a mycoherbicide and verification of its efficacy. Facing certain defeat by modern scientific achievement, pro-narcotics objections now claim that unwanted narcotics plants are crops, even when declared illegal, noxious and unwanted by the sovereign nations in which they grow. The claim extended--is that biological control of narcotic plants is biological warfare against crops, whether or not defined as such by the nation in question. (They are neither eaten nor do they provide nutrition.) No mention is made of the fact that biological control is successfully used to control unwanted organisms throughout the world: from insect pests in cotton to disease in cereal crops to noxious weeds in rice. Only drug advocates classify what is biological control in any other ecosystem as biological warfare when applied to control a narcotic plant species. It is vile reasoning that defies both reason and established science. A scientific solution exists to control the cultivation of narcotic producing plants, and to cut off major financing sources of future terrorist and criminal activities. If policymakers are not planning to employ modern science in their quest against terror and criminality, then you can reasonably suspect ignorance, lack of courage, or conclude they are beneficiaries of maintaining a poisonous status quo. We need to find out which may be the motivation for each political leader's actions. All moral assessments are, in part, a search for scapegoats. A just verdict from jurors who know the facts will be harsh, Mr. President, when judging political fingers stained with the fresh powder-burns of avoidable disaster. Perhaps politicians will begin by helping you now? Otherwise, one day too soon yet another investigation of a terrorist attack will witness with certainty that it was a tragedy that could easily have been prevented.
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