Coca en la Boca

Bolivian President Evo Morales has a well-written (and I assume ghost-written) op-ed in today’s New York Times calling for the coca leaf to be removed from the official UN list of substances banned from international export. Morales was in Vienna earlier this week to testify before a UN panel taking up the issue.

Writes Bolivia’s President:

What is absurd about the 1961 convention is that it considers the coca leaf in its natural, unaltered state to be a narcotic. The paste or the concentrate that is extracted from the coca leaf, commonly known as cocaine, is indeed a narcotic, but the plant itself is not.

Travelers to Bolivia are certainly familiar with the t-shirt on sale for foreigners, emblazoned with an artist’s image of a coca leaf, along with the slogan – “Coca is not cocaine.” And it doesn’t take a Nobel in chemistry to understand that the relationship between the coca leaf is roughly the same as between the potato and vodka, grapes, and wine, or hops and beer. In other words, you have to do a lot to the little plant of origin to turn it into something that can get you high. In coca’s case, that involves an elaborate chemical process to leach out the alkaloid that makes cocaine.

But as with most things, the debate is more complex that the cartoonish proclamations on the respective sides that “Coca is a drug that must be eradicated,” and “It’s just a harmless little green leaf.”

A Brief History of the War on Drugs

The coca leaf is the object of thousands of years of Andean culture. Used for everything from medicinal purposes, to rituals, to the familiar wad in the mouth to stave off hunger and slumber, the leaf is widely used among a large swath of Bolivians. It is hard to find a construction site, a farm, or a late-night taxi shift that does not involve someone with a small green plastic bag at the ready and a batch of leaves in the mouth.

The coca leaf, as separate from cocaine, was placed on the UN banned substances list, alongside heroin and cocaine, in 1961. And that placement was based on a dubious “scientific” study conducted nearly a decade before. More bluntly, ten years into the 21st century the world’s policy toward the coca leaf is based on a study conducted just around the time black and white television started showing up in U.S. living rooms.

In the 1980s when cocaine and then crack use soared in the United States, the U.S. government took a new interest in the coca leaf. Instead of investing in the strategy that has long been proven the most cost-effective, providing drug-treatment on demand to those with an addiction, the Reagan administration took its “Just Say No” mentality abroad. The U.S. government pressured governments in Latin America to go after cocaine at the source, by eradicating the raw product required to produce it (and to produce Coca Cola), the coca leaf.

I remember well that as U.S. funds were lavished on these eradication efforts, in California we couldn’t scrape together enough funds to guarantee drug treatment for pregnant women addicted to crack, an issue I worked on in the Legislature in those years.

Bolivia, a major producer of coca bound for the cocaine market in the 1980s (though still dwarfed then, as now by Colombia), was a main target. In 1988, under the direct threat of withholding of U.S. foreign aid, the Bolivian Congress approved its now-infamous anti-drug law, Ley 1008. In addition to laying out an eradication plan the law also guaranteed the U.S. Embassy ever-escalating drug arrests that it could include in its reports to the State Department and Congress as a measure of its success.

The U.S.-forced law established a network of special anti-drug prosecutors who received a special monthly salary bonus directly from the U.S. Embassy. To justify that cash from the U.S. the prosecutors padded their cases against the guilty with even more against the innocent. And under the law, those innocent were forced to stay in jail as long as a year and a half and more as their insanely slow trials moved through an inhuman legal system.

Bolivia’s jails filled and U.S. diplomats reported the arrests as success.

The hypocrisy of the U.S.’s official inability to distinguish between coca and cocaine is underscored even more as the Embassy has continued to serve coca tea to visitors and officially recommend it as a possible health treatment for tourists in La Paz suffering from high altitude problems. Until the DEA was forced out of the country last year by Morales, one of the Bolivian policeman assigned to guard its giant Cochabamba office from midnight to dawn used to chew a wad of the green leaf to stay awake as he stood gun-in-hand at the door.

Coca Si, Cocaine No?

The Morales administration, led by the nation’s most visible coca grower, set out to craft a different policy, one more in line with what European governments had advocated for many years. Instead of the U.S. strategy of “eradicate all your coca then take a chance on bananas and palm hearts,” the new Bolivian strategy of “coca si, cocaine no” allows coca growers to harvest a basic amount of coca, and aims to develop new markets for non-narcotic coca products – herbal tea, most especially. The UN listing of coca as a substance banned from export stands in the way.

As a basic strategy, it isn’t bad. I have served coca tea to hundreds of visitors for a decade, including a Texas Republican who gave me a George W. Bush necktie as a gift (I wear it at Halloween). People love it and I have no doubt that a solid market could be found throughout the U.S. and Europe for it (coca toothpaste and some of the other more exotic products, I am afraid, have a ways to go still). There are also promising medicinal uses for coca, including for the treatment of cocaine addiction itself.

That said, it is a myth that Bolivia’s coca crop is innocently directed at making tea and cookies. Regardless of what official statistics may have to say – from the UN, the Bolivian government or others – the anecdotal evidence here in Cochabamba makes it clear that coca aimed at the cocaine market is on the rise. More than one friend has stumbled unwittingly onto a lab in the hills above Apote. Another friend found himself in the middle of a police raid on a lab operation in his next-door neighbor’s house. There are enough of these stories, and others, floating around Cochabamba these days to know that something is up that the statistics (which show a minor increase in cocaine production in Bolivia and a big one in Colombia) alone don’t tell.

The problem is that he U.S. War on Drugs here has always been more about looking like there is a war on drugs than actually having one, hence the spending on big DEA offices abroad instead of big increases in treatment at home. In fact, whatever cocaine is coming out of Bolivia these days isn’t headed north as much as it is east, to Argentina and Brazil. Those are the governments with a huge stake in teaming up with Bolivia to make “coca si, cocaine no” something more than a slogan.

If the Obama is administration wants to get smart in the War on Drugs instead of just marketing a slogan of its own it will back away from insistence that the U.S. make the rules for Bolivia and it will support Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia to take real action together, on the demand and supply side both. The administration will also pull the U.S. back from being the main objector to pulling coca of the UN list. Similarly, the Morales government needs to cop to the fact that cocaine production is on the rise and deal with it.

Letting coca tea from Bolivia find its place on the shelves at Whole Foods in New York, Washington and San Francisco won’t stop Bolivia’s coca from being a part of the narcotraffic market. But every little green box that gets sold is one more real step to diverting that little green leaf in a much more healthful direction – for everyone.

Note: For a much more comprehensive look at the history of the coca leaf and of the War on Drugs against it, see Chapter 6 (“The Leaf at the Center of the War on Drugs”) in the Democracy Center’s new book, Dignity and Defiance, Stories from Bolvia’s Challenge to Globalization (University of California Press).