Leaf Me Alone

Narcotics have been with mankind for a very long time. They didn’t really garner much official attention until the last two hundred years, increasingly subject to governmental scrutiny as the ability to refine and concentrate the effects of what were all organic plants improved. It’s not as if the governments of old missed the negative effects of these narcotics.

The Opium Wars were fomented in the mid-1800s by Britain. England was experiencing a very negative balance of payments issue because it imported so much Chinese tea (popular in the UK since the 1700s), and the Chinese has no use for the reciprocal trade goods offered by the Brits. With an excess of raw opium in India, England screamed “free trade” and forced opium into China at gunpoint, even as the Qing Dynasty monarchs screamed in response about all the harm being done to addicts and their families. Joined by other Western powers in this military effort (including the U.S. until the Civil War drew its forces back), the resulting concessions in Shanghai, Macau and Hong Kong resulted from this war… and ultimately England found a way to steal tea plants and processes and relocate them to India.

Historically, however, the war on drugs has been a losing battle except in the most repressive regimes that had/have the power to monitor the intimate daily lives of each and every citizen. We know all about the Golden Triangle, the Afghan juggernaut that supplies over 90% of the world’s heroin (an opiate), and we have visions of American and Colombian military/DEA units descending on South American cocaine drug labs with destruction in their hearts. It’s a big business still, and the cartels are rolling in cash. One of the most controversial natural drugs has been cocaine, derived from coca leaves.

But that lowly pain-numbing coca leaf has been around a long time, and for many indigenous peoples, it is a part of the fabric of their religious life and how they cope with hard labor in high altitudes with limited nourishment. “Coca originated in the Andes Mountains of South America and was revered by pre-Inca peoples as early as 500 BC. Leaves from the coca bush were used in religious ceremonies and are still used to combat debilitating effects of high altitudes. Cocaine alkaloid (a chemical compound found in coca bush leaves that is used in medicines, drugs, or as a poison)—or simply cocaine—was first isolated and purified in the mid-1800's. It became commonly used in the late 1800s, but by the early 1900s, people realized its harmful effects and it became regulated as a drug.

“Prior to 1906, cocaine alkaloids were not separated from the flavoring used in making some cola-flavored soft drinks. Coca flavorings are still used in making today's cola-flavored soft drinks, but the cocaine alkaloids are removed and discarded.” StreetDrugs.org. You’ve seen Nat Geo images of these mountain folk chewing on the leaves to make their lives tolerable. The United States, with a maze of addiction over which it has made virtually no headway despite decades of trying, has always focused on stopping the drug trade beyond its borders. Foreign aid and favored nations trading status with the US is often predicated on drug eradication efforts. But as leftist anti-American governments have formed in some South American countries – notably Venezuela and Bolivia – US pressure in these nations has been much less effective. Still, even here, drugs are a national problem without referencing the big gringo power to the north.

“[Bolivian] President Evo Morales, who first came to prominence as a leader of coca growers, kicked out the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2009. That ouster, together with events like the arrest last year of the former head of the Bolivian anti-narcotics police on trafficking charges, led Washington to conclude that Bolivia was not meeting its global obligations to fight narcotics… But despite the rift with the United States, Bolivia, the world’s third-largest cocaine producer, has advanced its own unorthodox approach toward controlling the growing of coca, which veers markedly from the wider war on drugs and includes high-tech monitoring of thousands of legal coca patches intended to produce coca leaf for traditional uses.” New York Times, December 26^th.

The Bolivian government allows small local farmers to be licensed to grow small amounts of coca leaves for traditional uses. Two-fifths of an acre is the maximum allowable individual coca plot. These small plots are “mapped with satellite imagery, cataloged in a government database, cross-referenced with [the farmers’] personal information and checked and rechecked by the local coca growers’ union… To the surprise of many, this experiment has now led to a significant drop in coca plantings in Mr. Morales’s Bolivia [12-13% in just one year], an accomplishment that has largely occurred without the murders and other violence that have become the bloody byproduct of American-led measures to control trafficking in Colombia, Mexico and other parts of the region.” NY Times.

No the cartels are not eradicated, and many fear that this weak, pro-coca administration is ill-equipped to deal with modern and well-armed professional drug lords and their minions. But the process has produced incredible results, even if it flies in the face of US demands to shut down all aspects of the drug trade. Is this evidence that licensed and monitored drug use/trade is more effective than strong-arm police eradication tactics? Are there lessons here for US policy-makers?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the methodology that the US government has employed to stop the narcotics trade is one of our nation’s greatest failures; it’s time to start thinking about alternatives.