Changing the Drug War Debate

When Evo Morales took the office of president of Bolivia on Sunday, it was notable not only as the end of a "Bolivian-style apartheid" but also for making Morales the world's No. 1 spokesman for the coca plant.

Morales, himself a former coca farmer, preached a hard line against cocaine traffickers, but at the same time he announced his intention to resist Washington's $100 million compulsion to stamp out coca farming in his grindingly poor Andean nation.

For millennia, Bolivia's indigenous groups have chewed and brewed coca leaves as a mild stimulant and appetite suppressant. But the leaf's role as the central ingredient in cocaine has made it a primary enemy of America's war on drugs. The result: hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars, often in the form of helicopters and planes for aerial fumigation, which kills coca crops but also ravages Bolivians' health and environment.

Morales proposed to fight the cocaine traffickers, who send the drug to satisfy the North's desires, but also insisted that the coca leaf retake its rightful place in Bolivia's cultural life. "We say no to zero coca, but we are promoting zero cocaine," Morales was quoted by newswires last week. "We are going to try to interdict the narco-traffickers."

To grow legitimate markets, experts say Morales must shoot to change global attitudes that have long mingled the benign coca leaf with cocaine's devilish reputation. Drug policy experts say it could also mean taking on America's drug hysteria and revisiting the skewed science around which coca's prohibitionist regime was built some five decades ago. And Morales' plan also gives ammunition to U.S. critics who will use his coca policies to paint his socialist agenda in even more heretical hues.

The rise and fall of the global coca market

Ranking behind Colombia and Peru as the world's third-largest coca producer, Bolivia has some 65,500 acres under cultivation, according to U.S. estimates. In 2004, eradication programs, which began in the 1980s, were largely brought to a halt in one of Bolivia's two regions that can legally cultivate coca under national law. That deal was brokered in October 2004 between coca growers, led by Morales, and then-President Carlos Mesa. Now a European Union study is underway to mark how much coca is needed to meet traditional usage. In theory, the rest of the country's crop would be slated for eradication,

Besides ending eradication programs, Morales is widely expected to push for a revival of a global coca market.

"What Evo is proposing is very legitimate and credible from a scientific, historical and marketing perspective," said Ethan A. Nadelmann, executive director of the New York City-based Drug Policy Alliance. Nadelmann says Morales may help build an international market for coca-based products, similar to those that existed in the 19th century, when coca formed part of products such as tonics and wines, even Coca-Cola for a time. In December, an Indian tribe in Colombia began marketing a soft drink made from coca plants, and recent press reports from Bolivia suggests entrepreneurs are looking for early product niches, making it easy to see a future of coca-based medicines, gums or lozenges.

The case of coca is a fine example of just how well science can serve prejudice. Its production was criminalized by a 1961 international treaty that set a 25-year moratorium on legal coca consumption. That convention, stimulatingly entitled "The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961," prohibits coca cultivation, putting it currently at odds with Bolivia's national policy allowing a certain level of production. The convention, which also criminalizes cannabis, opium, morphine and heroin, is disliked by European countries pursuing heroin maintenance programs, and activists say Morales would do well to support any European efforts to amend that deal, as well as encourage other industrialized nations to do the same.