Coca Leaves Finally Get a Little Respect

Coca leaves and other products for sale on a Bogotá plaza. The salesman said these were imported from Peru.

Altho technically banned, Colombia's indigenous peoples
 cultivate and market coca leaf products.

For thousands of years, coca leaves have been chewed by Andean indigenous peoples, who also attribute to them religious significance. But then Europeans took coca leaves home and figured out how to extract a drug, which millions of people, particularly north Americans, proceeded to get themselves addicted to.

In 1961, to protect addicts in rich countries, the United Nations prohibited cultivating and chewing the leaves.

The prohibition seems wildly unfair. After all, even during U.S. alcohol Prohibition, grapes were still legal (and were marketed with instructions about how to turn them into an inebriating liquid). Coca leaves contain such a tiny amount of the cocaine alkaloid that they give users just a slight pick-me-up.

Vendors claim that coca products
cure all manner of ailments.

In 2009, to protest the U.N. prohibition, Bolivian Pres. Evo Morales, a one-time coca farmer who still heads a coca farmers organization, withdrew his country from the United Nations Convention on illegal drugs. The prohibition, he said, equated traditional coca leaf farmers with "narcotraffickers and drug users."

The other day, the U.N. readmitted Bolivia - with a special clause permitting coca leaf chewing. Incredibly, 15 countries objected to the exception for coca leaf chewing. And leading the opposition was, of course, the United States.

It's a tiny crack in the drug prohibitionism, and it begins to repair a huge historical double standard. After all, the same 1961 treaty which prohibited indigenous peoples' ancient traditions also included a specific exception for the Coca Cola Company, which adds a cocaine-free coca leaf extract to its soft drink.

But the exception doesn't include the other Andean nations, including Colombia, where indigenous people chew coca leaves and many people buy teas, cookies, ointments and drinks made from the leaves. And, there's of course no mention of the many millions of people all over the world who would surely like to try such coca leaf products, whose makers claim they provide all sorts of health benefits.

So, for the foreseeable future, these leaves, which could provide another export for Colombia and help relieve the country's beleaguered farmers, will remain technically prohibited.

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