‘The plant is not the problem’ - it’s time to end these farcical bans on coca leaves
Bolivia's government is set to initiate a UN and World Health Organisation review of powerful healing plant coca
A loud hammering noise rings out across a neighbourhood in the small town of Pailón in the eastern Bolivian lowlands. On the pavement in front of a store, amongst all the soft drinks, fruit and advertising hoardings, a man wearing a poncho is bent over a tree-trunk-turned-table and banging away at something. A nail or some other piece of metal-work, perhaps? No. What the man is going at, using a mallet, is a small, blue plastic bag filled with already semi-crushed coca leaves, which later he’ll keep in a wad in his mouth for hours at a time.
Elsewhere in Pailón, or indeed any village or town in this region of Bolivia, Santa Cruz, you’ll see the same thing. The store, the tree-trunk-turned-table, the mallet, an artisanal press. . . and sometimes a sign reading “coca machacada”, probably best translated as “crushed coca.” In the region’s capital, the booming city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, there are even numerous streets where scantily-dressed women stand out on the pavement and wave cars down in order to entice people to stop and buy.
In certain parts of Santa Cruz, particularly in the country-side, it can sometimes feel like half the world is “boleando”, as “chewing” coca is known - not that much chewing actually gets done. Anyone driving a lorry, 4x4, taxi, motorbike or some other kind of vehicle, farmers and farm labourers, agro-industry workers, storekeepers, men and women walking down the road, sometimes even children. . . they all seem to be at it. And it isn’t hard to spot. The wads of coca are so big that you can see it going on - bulging mouth after bulging mouth - from metres away. Get close enough and you can smell it on their breath too.
“Everyone is boleando,” one taxi-driver in Santa Cruz city told me, with understandable overstatement. “Everyone. Lawyers, doctors, engineers. . . everyone.”
How does he like to bolear?
“With bico, that’s all,” he said, meaning bicarbonate of soda, one of many kinds of alkaline or other admixtures often added to the coca.
“Never with stevia?”
“No. That I don’t like.”
The reasons that millions of Bolivians - and indeed millions more people in neighbouring Peru as well as other South American countries - chew coca are myriad. Although comparatively poorly-studied by scientists, it has been reported for many years to have a wide range of medicinal benefits, including increasing energy levels, improving concentration, raising mood, suppressing hunger, coping with high altitudes and treating gastrointestinal problems - some of which I can attest to personally. In a 2019 article in the chemistry journal Molecules, coca was described as “among the oldest cultivated medicinal plant species, with evidence of its use dating back at least 8000 years”, “utilized as a remedy for a wide variety of conditions, ranging from alleviating oral pains, digestive maladies, hunger, altitude sickness, muscular and skeletal aches, as well as sadness and sexual impotence.”
In addition to these explicit medicinal benefits, there are social, cultural and even spiritual reasons for chewing coca too. It is used “to promote individual work performance and self-discipline as well as to strengthen community ties via work-related social gatherings, “town hall” style meetings, religious ceremonies, and important life events (such as weddings and funerals), where sharing and using coca are central activities,” the Molecules article states. It also bears a “metaphysical significance”, according to that article, when offered “to nature, in divinatory practices, and as part of rituals believed to help sustain the balance between the human and natural worlds.”
How absolutely ridiculous, then, that in Pailón or anywhere else in Bolivia I was prohibited from buying the leaves of this extraordinary, powerful, nutrionally-rich and life-enhancing plant in order to bring them back into the UK, perhaps to chew or brew an invigorating tea. The reason I couldn’t do that is because the coca leaf is on Schedule 1 of the United Nations (UN) 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs which the UK ratified in 1964, and because of the UK’s own 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act and 2016 Psychoactive Substances Act. The UN Convention made the preposterous mis-step of effectively equating coca with cocaine - made from coca but obviously not the same thing - and attempting to abolish all coca chewing around the world within 25 years. Imagine trying to explain that to the millions of people up in the Andes or down in Bolivia’s lowlands!
In Spain, through which I had to transit on my return to the UK, people are being regularly prosecuted for bringing coca leaves into the country, according to a report last year by the Barcelona-based International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service (ICEERS). At least four cases have been brought to trial since January 2020, that report says, all of them involving “Andean migrants” “at a Spanish airport upon their arrival back into the country” carrying “relatively small quantities of coca leaf (between two to four kilograms).”
“The coca leaf is one of the three plant materials that are considered prohibited by international conventions and therefore illegal in most countries, [meaning] that possession, sale, and distribution is illegal and punishable by law,” ICEERS’s Jesús Alonso tells me. “In our opinion, this international prohibition is based on flawed arguments that are not supported by scientific or medical evidence and a lack of understanding of the cultural significance of coca leaves for many indigenous communities in South America.”
John Walsh, from the US-based Washington Office on Latin America, calls the decision to include coca in the UN Convention a “historical error.”
“When these treaties were conceived and the bases for these decisions were made, governments and UN institutions were steeped in colonialism and paternalistic, Western science that viewed indigenous coca chewers as victims of their own coca chewing - it was a way to help the poor, benighted indigenous free themselves from their own vices,” Walsh says. “Coca chewing was seen as its own form of addiction.”
A somewhat momentous attempt to overturn this absurd situation is set to be made imminently, with Bolivia’s government about to send a formal notification to the UN Secretary-General in order to initiate a review of the coca leaf being classified as a narcotic drug on Schedule 1 of the UN Convention, with the ultimate intention to have it removed. At the annual session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs held in Vienna in March, Bolivia’s Vice-President David Choquehanca Viena delivered a withering speech saying that the Convention had made a “historic error” by including coca and that as a result there had been “six decades violating indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, six decades discriminating against the traditional, nutritional, therapeutic and ritual use of coca, six decades implementing experimental policies and laws contrary to common sense and intended to exterminate the coca leaf, and six decades manufacturing consent on a global scale against the consumption of coca.”
The Bolivians’ plea in Vienna was echoed by the Colombian delegation too, in what the Swiss-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime described as the “highest-profile intervention of the week.” Vice-Minister for Multilateral Affairs Laura Gil Savastano emphasised the long-standing cultural importance of coca and how apparent attempts to eradicate it - through the so-called “War on Drugs” - had impacted her country, telling the Commission that “Colombia is tired of laying out its dead.”
“Putting the coca leaf on the 1961 Single Convention's list of controlled substances was a historic mistake against the indigenous peoples of the Andes,” Gil Savastano said. “The plant is not the problem - it’s part of our history and our traditions.”
According to the Netherlands-based Transnational Institute (TNI), which is supporting the Bolivians, the UN Convention “enshrined the traditional Western view, which equates coca with cocaine, and treats both in exactly the same way”, and therefore “a historical correction is long overdue.” TNI’s Martin Jelsma calls the upcoming move by Bolivia a “really important step” which will force the World Health Organisation (WHO), which is mandated to conduct the review, to “finally come out with a proper assessment of the health impacts of coca chewing based on the latest scientific evidence”, and therefore to “clearly state that the coca leaf, in its natural form, is in no way a health problem and can even have medicinal properties and beneficial effects.” At the same time, he says it will “force the WHO to correct its earlier, racist-influenced, cultural supremacy-based recommendation” made decades ago which was responsible for coca being included on Schedule 1 in the first place.
“The world is missing out on a potentially harmless mild stimulant that could also be helpful to reduce the market of some of the other, more harmful stimulants that coca could in part replace,” Jelsma tells me. “This is also one of the most blatant examples of how the UN system and treaties directly conflict with basic indigenous rights that have now been firmly established. I definitely see including coca in the Convention as a historical error.”