Post date: Mar 12, 2012 2:58:41 PM
VIENNA, AUSTRIA ( MARCH 12, 2012) (REUTERS) - Holding up a coca leaf to underline his message, Bolivian President Evo Morales urged a top U.N. anti-drugs meeting on Monday (March 12) to recognise his people's "ancestral rights" to chew the leaves without being labelled addicts.
Bolivian President Evo Morales addresses a U.N. meeting on drugs and calls for the consumption of the coca leaf to be declared legal.
"I come before you with a mandate from the people of Bolivia to respect the constitution and to recognise the legal consumption of the coca leaf. I want to tell you that this coca leaf, ladies and gentlemen, which back in the colonial era - and here I apologise to Spanish colleagues - but this was present during the colonial era. There was no criminalisation there at that time. It was never claimed that the coca leaf was poisonous. The peoples of Bolivia - not only the indigenous peoples, but the miners, the trappers, the students, the whole population - consume the coca leaf and there is no data in the world that proves that this coca leaf has an adverse effect on human beings," Morales said in his speech to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting in the Austrian capital, Vienna.
"The 1961 convention decided to put an end to coca leaf cultivation after 25 years, to put an end to that. Now 50 years have gone by, the consumption of these coca leaves has not ended, yet there are very few articles of this convention which are challenged, and I would like to very modestly ask all the signatories to this convention, all those involved with this who have a great commitment to humanity, I call upon you to correct, to repair an error that has gone on for more than 50 years. Because it is only just to recognise the legal consumption of coca leaf chewing," Morales said.
Coca is the raw material for making cocaine, but Bolivians have chewed the leaves for centuries as a mild stimulant that reduces hunger and altitude sickness.
Morales, who was leader of Bolivia's coca planters before rising to become the country's first indigenous president, has asked the United Nations to decriminalise the practice.
He also showed participants at the U.N. meeting in Vienna marmalade, tea and other products made with coca to back up his assertion that the leaf is not dangerous and can be beneficial.
The coca leaf was declared an illegal narcotic in the 1961 U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, along with cocaine, heroin, opium and morphine and a host of chemical drugs.
Bolivia has withdrawn from the Convention but hopes to rejoin with a reservation recognising coca chewing.
The Bolivian government has been trying to promote coca's health benefits and develop legal uses for its leaves in the world's no. 3 cocaine producer.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs said Bolivia had failed "demonstrably to make sufficient efforts to meet its obligations under international counternarcotics agreements".
Bolivia and the United States agreed late last year to patch up their differences and restore full diplomatic ties three years after the Andean nation's leftist president threw out the U.S. ambassador and Drug Enforcement Administration agents.
But Bolivia said it would not let U.S. anti-drugs agents return, even as government officials work with Washington on a plan to fight the narcotics trade.