Posted on 03/19/2006 7:12:10 PM PST by blam
Bolivia urges UN to defy Washington and legalise coca
By Sophie Arie in La Paz
(Filed: 20/03/2006)
Bolivia is leading a Latin American campaign to legalise coca plants despite them being vilified by the United States as the source of the world's cocaine industry.
Coca leaves: fans claim it aids digestion and contains more vitamins and nutrients than most vegetables
Under the slogan "coca is not cocaine", politicians, consumers and growers across the Andes are promoting the leaf's qualities and calling for coca-based tea, yoghurt, bread, toothpaste, shampoo and soap to be mass produced and exported.
Its fans claim it helps digestion, provides more vital vitamins, nutrients and fibre than most vegetables and can even combat obesity.
But the plant has been listed by the United Nations as a poisonous species since 1961 because it also contains the alkaloid needed to make cocaine.
Bolivia has this week been arguing the case for legalising coca to the UN narcotics and crime agency in Vienna and hopes to change its status by 2008.
Indigenous communities have chewed its leaf here since 2,500 BC and brewed it as tea to boost their strength and stave off hunger and tiredness.
Even today, Bolivia's tin miners, who work in appalling work conditions, chew coca around the clock to stay awake and dull pain.
Prsident Evo Morales, a former grower who has campaigned for peasants' rights to tend the crop, has vowed to crack down on cocaine production in Bolivia, the world's third largest producer after Colombia and Peru.
But he insists the country should be allowed to grow more coca for natural, legal consumption.
And in neighbouring Peru a frontrunner in next month's election, Ollanta Humala, has suggested baking 27 million loaves of bread from coca leaves for school breakfasts daily.
Small companies in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, have launched coca-based energy drinks, biscuits, breads and yoghurts, all faintly green in colour and supposedly providing invaluable nutritional benefits.
And although not officially for export, leaf-shaped coca biscuits are a popular buy at airport souvenir shops.
Some also claim that the leaf's ability to stunt appetite could provide a natural cure to the world's obesity epidemic.
Maria Eugenia Tenorio, Bolivia's best known coca cook, even claims to have lost more than two stone in eight months by eating large numbers of coca biscuits.
"If Bolivians just started cooking with coca, they could solve most of the problems of malnutrition here," she said in her La Paz kitchen, kneading green coca flour into mashed potatoes to make a local version of gnocchi.
The US spends up to $1 billion a year tackling drugs in the Andes.
The idea that more coca can be grown in Bolivia without boosting more cocaine production is "pie in the sky", US officials say.
Legalise is fine. It is simply an alternate spelling.
From "Ask Oxford":
legalize
(also legalise)
• verb make legal.
— DERIVATIVES legalization noun.
Somebosy should alert the Libertarians. I'm sure they'll have 1,001 more handy uses for the Coca leaf these guys never thought of. All legal and vital to the global economy, of course.
High time to genetically engineer some argicultural pest or virus targeting coca plant.
Well, oil is legal and it's destroying the earth so, why not coca? <>
They taste like oak leaves too, yummm!
Heroin was developed to cure morphine addicts, and it worked too. Heroin users never wanted morphine again.
Well, oil is legal and it's destroying the earth so, why not coca? <>
OMG! The "O" word!!
Coca leaves are OK, cocaine brings problems. Its the refining that's the issue. Unfortunately, they are difficult to separate.
Humala is a Chavez ally who has already been involved in a military mutiny. Like early Chavez. And like Chavez for some reason this mutineer is running for president instead of being shot for treason. It must surely have occurred to someone by now that Chavez ought to have been shot when he was a mutinous colonel, and Humala ought to be sitting in a cell somewhere.
Similarly another Chavez ally, who led a coup in Ecuador, was later elected president only to be run out of the country on a rail a few years later. He's back, stirring up trouble again.
Mutineers should be charged and jailed, or shot. They should not be pardoned and allowed to run for office.
Bolivia's president, another Chavez ally, is a thug who represents the coca interests in the country. His campaign platform was that Bolivia's hydrocarbons would enslave the people, whereas coca was culturally authentic and its path to prosperity. It should be no mystery that a country that would forgo oil production for coca not only is poor, but deserves to be poor. And will stay poor.
Some spooks will not like this idea.
It's looking more and more as if the cycle of progress and democratization in Latin America has reached its peak. Now the pendulum has swung, and we are heading back to government by thugs, incompetents, dictators, and Communists.
Pity.
It's not like anybody is going to ask for their input.
in Coca Cola's early days, they did not call a dope for nothing.
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True.
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