New super strain of Coca yielding plants

Not sure if this has been posted as its fairly old news but I figured I'd share anyways.

DRUG traffickers have created a new strain of coca plant that yields up to four times more coc aine than existing plants and promises to revolutionise Colombia’s drugs industry.

The new variety of coca, the raw material for coc aine, was found in an anti-drug operation on the Caribbean coast, on the mountainsides of the Sierra Nevada, long known as a drug-growing region.

Samples of the plant were sent for laboratory analysis and experts then pronounced drugs traffickers had developed a new breed.

This is indeed a scary thought, using genetic engineering and specialized cross breeding traffickers have been able to develop the ultimate yielding Cocaine plant. It's more like a tree then a bush according to the article and the yield is an incredible 4x the amount prior to this new breed. The leaf contains 97-98% hydrochloride beating the natural plant which carries somewhere in the 25% (0.1 and 0.9 percent coc aine) range. The typical growth height is 5 ft, while the new super breed is 12 ft.

Unrelated to this article I was reading that the future super breeds are trying to isolate benzoylecgonine and mask/eliminate it. This circumvents the detection process that is currently in use across the globe. Cocaine is metabolized much too quickly to be tested for so we may have a horrible problem in the near future.

news.scotsman.com...