Paraquat

I had never heard of Paraquat until Sugar Alpha. It wasn’t clear in my dad’s original manuscript what it was however in later paragraphs he tries to illustrate the sick marijuana harvests, people and animals. So I had to do a little digging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat

Basically, Paraquat is an herbicide and during the late 1970s and 1980s, a controversial program sponsored by the US government sprayed paraquat on marijuana fields in third world countries. Below is an interesting article about the US Government’s admitance to spraying the harmful chemicals to control marijuana growth.

http://intellihub.com/2013/04/12/us-gov-admitted-to-spraying-paraquat-poison-on-marijuana-in-1980s/

I started editing Sugar Alpha in 2008 and the resources I had found online and documented, no longer exist. Belize is now a flourishing tourist destination and I’m sure content has been filtered, respectively. When I was writing this post, I saw that Paraquat had a “new look.” http://paraquat.com/

Did you know, in the movie script, The Big Lebowski it says, “The Dude calls The Big Lebowski a “human paraquat.”

One of my resources for writing about Belize’s cultural history is in this .pdf if you want to read more about the tiny little paradise: http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNAAQ597.pdf