Evo Morales chews coca at UN drug summit
Bolivian President Evo Morales ate a coca leaf in front of delegates at the Vienna meeting of the UN Commission for Narcotic Drugs (CND) March 12, to press his demand that the crop be removed from the UN's list of prohibited drugs. "We're for the coca leaf but against cocaine," Morales said. "The coca leaf should no longer be vilified and criminalized!"
Calling the ban of the leaf a "major historical mistake," Morales said: "Coca leaf consumption goes back to the year 3000 BC. How are you going to end its consumption in 25 years, knowing that it is not harmful?" This was a reference to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which established a list of internationally prohibited drugs and called for the chewing of the coca leaf to be abolished within 25 years.
In a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Morales called for removing coca leaf from the Single Convention treaty. "Chewing coca leaves is a thousand-year-old practice of the indigenous communities in the Andes mountains that can't and shouldn’t be prohibited," Morales wrote, according to a copy of the letter e-mailed to Bloomberg news service by Bolivia's Foreign Ministry. The coca policies "established by the UN in 1961 constitute a threat to the rights of indigenous communities."
Morales, a former coca grower, crafted a new constitution for Bolivia which voters approved in January—for the first time protecting coca leaf as a cultural heritage of the country's indigenous peoples and a "factor in social cohesion."
At the CND, UN member states agreed to continue policies of prohibition and eradication for another ten years, although with a greater emphasis on prevention and "harm reduction." The new document replaces a 1998 UN plan to significantly reduce drug abuse and trafficking within 10 years.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime acknowledged in a report issued on the eve of the summit that the worldwide drug trade had swelled to more than $300 billion annually and that anti-drug policies had indirectly created "a criminal market of macroeconomic size." (Bloomberg, Reuters, AFP, AP, March 12)
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"knowing that it's not harmful"
Why are the heavily financed and reportedly well-informed leaders of the world always so ignorant? President Morales makes a very good point that cocoa leaf consumption goes back to 3000 BC, but no one mentions the list of other banned substances which have been used--and often revered--for thousands of years. Cannabis sativa, or marihuana was likely the first domesticated crop and is quite literally the most useful plant known to man. Today, industrial hemp is necessary for establishing sustainable manufacturing processes for things like houses, cars, clothing, plastics, paper, fuel and food just to name a few. Beyond all this, cannabis has also been cultivated as medicine since at least 2,700 BC--which is how old a recently discovered Chinese shaman's tomb was reported to be.
The truth is that our War on Drugs also functions as a war on shamanism and any other form of spirituality which sees plants as somehow divine. This is an ugly religious crusade which has been going on for far too long. When will these people realize that they are destroying their own cultures and a way of life far superior to the infamous "american dream"?! Every study ever conducted on cannabis, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT or any other substance traditionally used by shamans has proven them to be very effective medicine. Our science backs these claims up, probably because the modern scientific method was actually pioneered by shamans.
We should be studying these plants and learning from cultures which managed to sustain themselves for many thousands of years, instead we burn the forests and kill anyone who would dare fight against our idiocy. We may never all agree about which drugs should be used for any particular ailment, but can't we all agree that prohibition has been a horrific catastrophe? Making plants and chemicals illegal does not make those substances disappear, it only creates much bigger problems. If our illustrious rulers don't realize this soon, there won't be anything left for them to "rule" over.
Evo makes the op-ed page
From the New York Times op-ed page, March 14: