Features
A Weapon in the Drug War
Toxicologist's studies find no health risk from spray program in Colombian coca fields
BY ANDREW VOWLES
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| Prof. Keith Solomon visits Colombia regularly to study the human health and environmental risks of a chemical spraying program crucial to international efforts to wipe out coca production there. Photo by Jon Marshall |
Prof. Keith Solomon's current project scares him sometimes. It's not Colombia's drug cartels he's concerned about or the possibility of being kidnapped by armed rebels. After all, he has bodyguards as he travels around the country.
Nor does the environmental biologist worry about being shot by coca farmers or enforcers in the cocaine trade. He's typically flown into coca-growing country in a heavily armed Blackhawk helicopter as part of a chopper convoy that includes a police escort and a search-and-rescue team.
What gets to him is the flying itself, especially hanging in his lap belt as the pilot negotiates occasional banking turns that leave the Guelph researcher looking straight down at the mountains through the aircraft's open door. Reflecting on his unlikely assignment, Solomon says: “I'm petrified of heights. Flying in a helicopter with the doors open is not a very comfortable thing.”
But that's about the only way to reach some of those coca fields hacked out of the dense rainforest in this South American nation. There, the longtime Guelph toxicologist is studying human health and environmental risks of a chemical spraying program crucial to international efforts to wipe out production in a country that supplies about 80 per cent of the world's cocaine.
Since 2004, Solomon has led an international scientific advisory team to the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission of the Organization of American States (OAS). They're still investigating possible environmental impacts, particularly effects on animals in one of the world's biodiversity hot spots. But their finding of no human health risk from spraying has given the Colombian government added impetus in its fight against the drug trade.
It's a somewhat paradoxical assignment, he concedes. After all, spraying is intended to stem an illicit industry that entails enormous human and economic costs around the world. But questions about the program's safety led the OAS to investigate the issue.
The group's studies have uncovered no human health risk, a result that mirrors studies and reviews in other places around the world. “Glyphosate is the most widely used pesticide in the world,” says Solomon. “It's been used for many years.”
Their latest report was published early this year in Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. The study was also reported in a four-page story that included comments by Solomon in Environmental Science and Technology, published in May by the American Chemical Society.
The team is now looking more closely at effects on animals, specifically frogs living near or in coca plots. About 700 species of frogs live in Colombia, including about 350 species that are found only in that country. The amphibians are naturally more sensitive to many environmental chemicals.
Those results have been more equivocal. “They're looking for a mixture of glyphosate and other components that would control the crop but is less toxic to other organisms,” says Solomon, who visits the plots after spraying to take soil and water samples. Those samples are analyzed in several labs, including Laboratory Services at U of G.
(In a unique twist, he will study different pesticide formulations on about 10,000 plants being specially grown this summer in an undisclosed site in Colombia. The plots are tended by Colombian anti-narcotic police; the seedlings were bought from producers using OAS funding.)
Solomon has visited Colombia about a dozen times over the past three years, including this past spring. Each time, bodyguards meet him at the airport in the capital, Bogotá, to speed him through customs and escort him to his hotel. Those guards stick close to him throughout his stay.
“I've never felt threatened,” he says. And he's never been shot at or even heard gunfire in Colombia. The closest he's come to cocaine itself is seeing it pictured in news reports about occasional drug busts.
For post-spraying field trips, he wears dark nondescript clothing (harder to aim at, he explains) and a bulletproof vest. He flies in the scientists' armed Blackhawk accompanied by other choppers bearing anti-narcotics police called junglas, as well as support and search-and-rescue teams. The junglas land first, staking out the edge of the field with weapons cocked. The scientists get 15 minutes to do their job before heading back to the chopper.
Although he hasn't flown in a spray plane, Solomon has observed the operation from accompanying helicopters. Spray planes are equipped to pinpoint the plots and apply the spray accurately.
“The spray operation is at the highest level of technology you can get. It's as good as the forestry spraying they do in Canada.”
Solomon adds that the spray program to control the coca crop is safer than the chemicals used by the farmers to grow the crop in the first place.
“The environmental damage caused by coca production far exceeds that of the eradication spraying. Our work has been helpful in putting numbers to that.”
That doesn't include the ecological damage caused when growers slash out their plots in the rainforest — even in several national parks. Referring to many growing areas that he's visited around the country, Solomon says: “The Andes biodiversity hot spot goes right through Colombia.”
He notes that poor farmers have little choice but to grow the crop, often under threat from players in the cocaine trade.
“There's so much money involved. Farmers can make more money growing coca than coffee or bananas.”
Back at Guelph, he's found his South American assignment is an attention-grabber during lectures. In 2004 and 2005, he also enlisted final-year students in the toxicology program to help compile a report on the toxicology of substances used in coca growing and cocaine production.
“It gets attention in class. It's an opportunity to apply toxicology to real-world situations that are important. On top of that, they were paid for their work by the OAS.”