Bolivia's battle to decriminalise coca leaf
WHO study boosts South American nation's desire to export cocaine ingredient
BY HARRIET MARSDEN, THE WEEK UK
PUBLISHED YESTERDAY
Bolivia is pushing for the global decriminalisation of coca leaf – the main ingredient of cocaine – to export the plant and ease its economic crisis.
The South American nation is the world's third-largest producer of both the ancient leaf and cocaine itself. But outside of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, the leaf is still classified as a narcotic by the United Nations and is on its list of prohibited drugs. The US and other Western nations have long "blocked Bolivia's attempts to decriminalise the leaf", blaming coca farmers – cocaleros – for "many of the world's drug problems", said The Independent.
But a "landmark" recent decision by the World Health Organization to launch a study into the non-narcotic benefits of coca has "rekindled the old hopes of Bolivian farmers". This study, which a committee will consider in October, is "the first step in a lengthy process to decriminalise the leaf worldwide".
Coca, Morales and UN prohibition
Indigenous communities in South America – including the Quechua and Aymara in Bolivia – have long used coca leaf in spiritual rituals and medicinal concoctions. But Bolivians' legal right to chew the leaf was lost when the country (then under a dictatorship) joined the UN's 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which has since underpinned international drug policy.
In 2011, President Evo Morales (the country's first Indigenous ruler and a former coca producer and union leader) notified the UN that Bolivia would be withdrawing from the convention.
Morales, who had already famously thrown the US Drug Enforcement Agency out of Bolivia, argued that the ban contravened the new 2009 constitution, which promised to "protect native and ancestral coca as cultural patrimony". The leaf, the argument went, was "not a narcotic" in its natural state. In 2013, Bolivia reacceded to the convention – with an exemption for chewing coca leaves.
More:
https://theweek.com/politics/bolivias-battle-to-decriminalise-coca-leaf
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