Take a harmless virus or bacterium, of which there are plenty, and insert the appropriate THC-producing gene(s). Presto change-o! Instant THC plague across the land!

Similar things are being done today in biotech and pharmaceutical companies across the world in order to produce various other therapeutic drugs. The art has mostly been taken out of it. It is now mostly a science. This project should be easy to implement.

I am not going to comment on the ethics of doing such a thing, but the technique is certainly available.

i read the story(i first thought it had actually happened)
about the THC producing oranges...(i would plant my backyard
with citrus, maybe even tear down part of the house to make
more room...) bummer when i discovered it was just humor...

genetic engineering is becoming awful easy with a little
training... we may have some REALLY interesting broccoli(a
WINTER crop!) in a few years...

Since the hops producers are really essential for the beer producers they can't afford to get prohibited as a knee jerk reaction to the pot hop plant.

Without going into how I know, I have it on good authority - from someone who is an expert in the field of genetic engineering - that what Lehder proposes is eminently possible. Plant DNA is much simpler to manipulate than animal DNA; in fact according to my source, you could take the part of a rhinovirus that causes The Common Cold out of it's delivery mechanism and insert something else in it and it will deliver that just as easily.

Now imagine someone learning how to duplicate the trichome producing gene of cannabis and transplanting it to an equally common - but much less notorious - weed. Or even better, a food plant, like lettuce. Or potatoes. Any large-surface leaf plant would be ideal.

Given its' propensity for histrionics, I can just imagine the Government talking heads shrieking that they have to protect America's Youth from...lettuce. Celery. Potatoes. Of particular attention would be produce made in nations that also formally produced the illicit drugs. Gotta quarantine those Colombian coffee beans, they might pollute our children with camouflaged cannabis!

It's been said before that the more obvious an irrational act is made to the public, the more likely they will be to cause it to be discontinued. Joe Sixpack is absolutely clueless as to what can happen to him if he's ensnared in the DrugWar he acquiesces to everyday. But get between him and his beer because of possible genetic alterations in the hops and yeast, and he'll get upset. Very upset.

Just like the line about donkeys and two-by-fours.

I had a similar idea a while ago about a drug-to-be that would end the war on drugs. I wish I knew a little more about biology.

one day i was looking at drawings of amino acids in a text book on physiology. Now, not knowing much about biology, i'm going to be off some here, but as i very roughly understand these things, RNA copies little chunks of information from DNA and then scampers about using the instructions to build amino acids. Now many of these amino acids in the pictures looked similar to some of the illegal chemicals like methamphetamine and ecstasy that have carbon rings with various appendages sticking out of them. So with some genetic splicing one should be able to plant an engineered DNA strand in a bacterium like e-coli that would then provide the instructions for a natural synthesis of a mind-altering drug. In other words, drugs could be manufactured in a process very similar to the production of alcohol from yeast and sugar. You simply dump a packet of the engineered bacteria ( like the yeast ) into a bucket of very common chemicals, wait a week or two and find a bucketful of dope. So instead of smuggling tons of dope across borders, one need only transport a small packet of "yeast". This would spread rapidly until everyone had all the yeast she could use, all for free, thus ending the war on drugs as palpably and utterly futile. Whenever it rained, the drug plows would have to be brought out to clear the roads of bubbling, fermenting mind-altering dope. Let them fight that war.

Krack Caffeine,,the new potent smokable form of caffeine,derived
from common Yuban,or Folgers......wouldnt that be a wonderful
curveball to toss into the drug war!......Juan Valdez would be the
new poster boy reformed junkie,doing public service ads for the
ondcp at 4:30 in the morning;;,,"I can keep a kid off Kraffeine"...

Being an old fart, I remember the news conferences and talking head shows of the 1960's where pols and bureaucrats and generals (far from the rice paddies and mountains of the combat zones) would pontificate nightly on the Tube about how we were winnning the war in The 'Nam. This would be juxtaposed against the rising body count...of US forces.

The Best and the Brightest would get on screen and go on at length about how this new policy or that one would secure victory. But on the nightly news, our guys with their a** in the grass, would give a very different viewpoint. One not welcomed by the Brass.

The was a huge disconnect between the policy makers in Washington DC and the real policy makers, the grunts forced to slug it out with an enemy that had all the natural advantages you could ask for.

The reality didn't match the propaganda, obviously. But it took tens of thousands of US lives and God knows how many Viet ones before Washington got the message.

The Europeans at the time were watching all this with jaded amusement. The French had already had their 'go of it' and knew from bitter experience how the scenario would play out; they'd had the same thing happen to them. But Uncle was so cock-sure that he could do what other nations couldn't that he just got in deeper and deeper into the quicksand.

...a drug fighting effort targeting several Andean nations in a follow-up program to "Plan Colombia"....
Yeah - Plan Gran Colombia. Totalitarian movements are global in scope, and Plan Colombia means all of South America starting with anyplace that has petroleum.