The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7170 p576
20 October 2001

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Funding terrorism
Biowarfare battle
Need for restraint

Funding terrorism

In outlining the methods available to cripple the supporters of terrorism in Afghanistan, the revenue drawn by the Taliban rulers from illicit drugs is rarely mentioned. Yet Afghanistan produces vast quantities of opium poppies and has refineries that prepare its more valuable derivative diamorphine for export.

By 1999 the United Nations Drugs Control Programme concluded that Afghanistan was growing more than 4,000 tonnes of opium per annum. This made it the source of three-quarters of the world’s illegal diamorphine and 90 per cent of Europe’s, according to a report in New Scientist for 29 September. This provides a valuable cash revenue for the Taliban and enables them to accumulate military equipment while allowing the country to go hungry.

Ideas for destroying poppy fields from the air have included the use of a fungus that attacks the roots of the plant. However, the possible adverse effect of such a method on public opinion makes it a doubtful course of action, since it would be regarded as a dangerous piece of biological warfare. Discovering and destroying stockpiles of opium and diamorphine would be better, but presents grave practical difficulties.

Attempts to ban the growing of opium poppies have produced starvation among the farmers and labourers of the affected region, and added to the refugee problem. In the political sphere, it is acknowledged that Afghanistan’s neighbour Pakistan is also a major opium producer, and this fact complicates the issue.

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Biowarfare battle

Warfare and terrorism through the deliberate spreading of bacterial and viral infections is a worrying topic. Although we tend to regard biowarfare as a modern concept, dependent upon a sophisticated laboratory and technical process, it is not new.

During the continental wars that occupied so much of the medieval period, two techniques practised by warring factions were the fouling of the enemy’s water supplies with infected bodies and the projection of the corpses of smallpox victims over the battlements of besieged garrisons. Since then, infective brews have been prepared, the preferred organisms being those responsible for plague, anthrax and smallpox. Strains of high virulence are available, and it appears that establishments for their cultivation in large quantities exist in many countries and are difficult to pinpoint and control. In The Lancet for 29 September is a discussion about the problems encountered. It is agreed that most local and national authorities show little preparedness against a possible biological onslaught, and it is extremely difficult to know what can be done. The one bright aspect is that so far a practical means of distributing noxious agents has been lacking, as terrorists discovered when trying to poison travellers on the Tokyo underground. To have a culture available is one thing, but to project it to produce an epidemic is another. Nevertheless, computer projections have suggested that an attack in the United States with smallpox virus could go undetected for nine days, making containment impossible, and give rise to an international epidemic of frightening proportions.

The World Health Organization has recently released a report entitled ‘Health aspects of biological and chemical weapons’, which stresses the need for countries to increase their capacity to cope with the consequences of a biological or chemical onslaught. It is believed that most if not all outbreaks of infectious disease could rapidly be detected through a system of 72 global and regional networks of laboratories, expert public health workers and information through the internet. The WHO effort is being backed by more than 250 laboratories, says its director general.

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Need for restraint

In the course of once again perusing ‘Science and poetry’ (2001) by the moral philosopher Mary Midgley, I reflected upon the curious attitude we adopt towards the two qualities of co-operation and competition. Up to a point, both ideals are worthy of careful consideration when adopted as motives for action, both in the individual and the collective spheres. To a greater extent they are, however, unrelentingly antagonistic towards one another.

Competitive thinking means that we detect that someone else is aiming at the same reward as ourselves and take every step possible to throw him or her off the rails. Co-operative thinking means that we can see how collaboration with another promises to advance the interests of both of us. The first helps us as individuals, or so we hope. The second advances the common interest, and is obviously the more civilised and less selfish of the two. It appears, when we survey the state of human society and the condition of the earth in which we must live and die, that we shall have to seek a balanced compromise between the alternatives.

Charles Darwin added to the title of his ‘Origin of species’ (1859) “by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”. This idea has been responsible for much of the misinterpretation which scientists have awarded Darwin, painting him as an advocate of racial discrimination and of the principle of survival of the fittest. That has been a distorting oversimplification, and we can no longer take it at its face value.

Since Darwin, philosophers have become aware that the rationality of science cannot be assumed to be absolute, that there can be no clear division between body and mind, and that a holistic attitude towards earthly phenomena is essential if we are to prevent our planet and its occupants from become insupportable of productive life. As Midgley points out, the modern world has unwisely placed economics above ecology. This leads us to pay more attention to competitive behaviour than co-operative action and to forget that much of the functioning of the earth’s living and dead components calls for mutualism and symbiosis.

We are seeing today that the cut-throat competition between business organisations results in the rich growing richer and the poor poorer, an antisocial effect if ever there was one. Moreover, the same spirit of competition creates commercial giants that can and do dictate to governments and politicians, so making a mockery of the notion of democracy and representation of the individual citizen. In addition, and perhaps worse for our future, the spirit of greed arising from fierce competitiveness threatens our environment by disturbing the natural balance of the ecological systems of the earth. It is high time to control such developments and show more restraint and understanding of one another.

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