Over the past 24 hours, you may have seen a few tweets and headlines and Reddit threads about the Colombian government and a proposal to use “coke-head butterflies” to kill coca plants.
The internet, unsurprisingly, is scrambling the message. The most important thing about this story is the fact that the Colombian government says it will stop trying to end the coca trade by spraying the countryside with glyphosate herbicide—also known as Monsanto’s Roundup—which the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded was “probably carcinogenic in humans” and almost certainly cancer-causing to grazing animals. It also kills other, legal crops.
We’ve all known for years that the war on drugs has been a colossal and brutal failure, both domestically and internationally, and every little step toward ending it is a cause for small celebration.
But I can tell that what you really want to know about are those “coke-head butterflies.”
First off, Colombian officials aren’t talking about butterflies, but the larvae of two species of moth: Eloria noyesi and Eucleodora cocae. And there’s been talk about using them to curb coca production since at least the 1980s.
A 1988 article in New Scientist reported that an unusually large swarm of the moths gave officials the idea after it destroyed 20,000 hectares (or 77.2 square miles) of coca crop in Peru.
“Once we learn to breed the malumbia,” a Peruvian entomologist with National Agrarian University said at the time, using the moth’s colloquial name, “we may be able to air-drop pupae or even release adult butterflies [sic] into the area without putting ourselves in too much danger.”
In 1990, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration would spend around $6.5 million for a coca-eating-moth feasibility study.
But the plan never came to fruition. As a Congressional report about coca eradication from the early ’90s concluded: “The current state of bio-control development does not seem to offer a timely mechanism for reducing coca production in the Andean nations.” Herbicides were faster.
What evolutionary pressures led the larvae to prefer coca? Their digestion process turns the plant into actual cocaine base—which is repellant to certain species of ants. Some sources say they excrete the cocaine paste as a kind of “shield” to keep the ants away. Other say they “regurgitate when molested”—they vomit liquid cocaine on ants to repel them.
The 1990s Congressional report also notes that one species of nematode (or roundworm) could also be used for bio-control. And what kills nematodes? Levamisole, the mystery ingredient that keeps turning up in the cocaine coming out of South America. (We know it’s there, but we don’t know why—and it has been causing serious and sometimes fatal immune-system crashes in some US users.)
That’s an interesting coincidence, but I don’t think those facts actually have anything to do with the mystery of the tainted cocaine. That may have been solved in 2014, when some scientists published their findings that levamisole “exerts amphetamine-like actions at monoamine transporters.”
Lab-based drugs are typically easier and cheaper to make—less land, less exposure to law enforcement, less labor. Which means levamisole-tainted cocaine probably isn’t going away anytime soon.
But, in honor of the “coke-head butterfly” meme, please enjoy this home video of a man being swarmed:
