Yew Trees' Anti-Cancer Fame Spurs Bark Thieves

OAKRIDGE, Ore. - Rangers on the Northwest's national forests are chasing a new kind of poacher: one with a homemade drawknife who strips the bark from Pacific yew trees to cash in on demand for a new anti-cancer drug.

"It's a damn waste," said Jim Simonson, yew coordinator of the Willamette National Forest, as he looked over the naked white trunks of 62 yews illegally stripped along the North Fork of the Willamette River.

Bark from the Pacific yew is the primary source of taxol, a drug that stops cells from dividing and shows extraordinary promise against cancer. In studies of woman with advanced ovarian cancer, taxol has shrunk tumors in one-third of the participants. It may be effective against other cancers, as well.

The National Cancer Institute is so excited about the drug that the federal government has pledged to collect 750,000 pounds of yew bark a year. That would produce about 55 pounds of taxol, enough to treat 1,250 people in clinical research.

In a multimillion-dollar deal, the federal government has granted Bristol-Meyer Squibb Co. exclusive rights to produce taxol from bark collected on national forests.

Selling for $2.50 a pound, yew bark means easy money for folks living in the woods. Logging restrictions to protect the northern spotted owl are making it tougher for loggers and millworkers to make a living.

"As more and more people are laid off work, and mills close, we are expecting to see more crime problems on the national forests," said Carola E. Stoney, forest special agent on the Willamette.

"Of course, this deal on taxol has just taken the yew bark sort of right to the head of the class."

Authorities have found no evidence of a black market, though rumors abound, Simonson said. There is also talk that desperate cancer patients may be trying to make a home remedy. But since taxol isn't water soluble, it would be useless to brew a tea from the bark, he said.

Simonson said poachers probably mixed their bark in with bark taken with a permit and sold it to the only authorized buyer. That's Hauser Northwest in Cottage Grove, a division of Hauser Chemical Research Inc. of Boulder, Colo., which extracts the taxol and sells it to Bristol-Myers.

To prevent poaching, Hauser estimates how much bark should be coming in from permitted peelers working on national-forest timber sales. "To my knowledge, there hasn't been any case of anyone who has approached us to sell bark that wasn't taken with a permit," said Dean P. Stull, Hauser's chief executive officer.

While the government estimates 30 million yew trees grow on 11 million acres of federal lands in the Northwest, the trees grow so slowly no one expects the bark alone to meet the demand for taxol.

Scientists have synthesized a portion of the taxol molecule and hopes had rested on extracting it from yew branches and needles, which can be harvested without killing the tree.

All that could change. Last week, ESCAgenetics Corp. of San Carlos, Calif., announced it had cloned taxol from tissue cultures. Company President Raymond Moshy said within two years he expected to be able to commercially produce about 220 pounds of taxol a year without yew trees.

Of the 19 national forests in the region, five have reported yew-bark thefts: the Mount Hood, Willamette, Umpqua and Rogue River national forests in Oregon and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington.

"We are going to be very aggressive in our investigation," said Richard Stem, timber and fire staff officer on the Gifford Pinchot, where more than 100 yew trees have been found illegally stripped. "If we get massive amounts of it being stolen now, stripped out now, where are we going to go for future sources?"

Terry Bertsch, the Forest Service officer investigating the theft on the Willamette National Forest, says the rustlers are difficult to stop.

"You are hidden down a secluded road," Bertsch said of a yew poacher. "The road isn't traveled but maybe once or twice through the winter. It's absolutely noiseless, because it doesn't involve a power saw. It's all done by hand."

The Willamette theft might never have been discovered but for a timber faller who happened to drive by and notice it. A reward of $5,000 was posted, and generated a couple of dozen tips. But prospects for an arrest are dim.

Bark that took 80 to 200 years to grow was stripped in minutes, from as high as a man can reach to about knee height. From 62 trees, the poachers took about 500 pounds of bark, worth $1,250, and left behind about 1,000 pounds, enough to treat a dozen cancer patients.

The stripping killed most of the trees by girdling them, stopping the flow of life-giving sap. The stump may produce sprouts, but the trees are lost.

Simonson and Bertsch figure Hauser officials are doing all they can to assure they don't collect poached bark, but there is no way to tell for sure.

"They have a permit system where each bag (of bark) is supposed to have a tag on it, with the guy's name on it, where he got it, the permit number," Simonson said. "They also have a trip permit that is supposed to be filled out for every person in a vehicle peeling bark.

"But anybody that has one of those permits could then take it and go off in the woods and peel some more bark and slip it in with the permitted stuff, and that's probably what happened here."