For decades, coca has been treated as contraband, the raw material for cocaine. The police rip out plants across the Andes, and Washington has poured billions into eradication campaigns.
And yet here in Bolivia, where growing, selling and consuming coca is legal, a government communications officer steadied a tripod in the tiny Andean town of San José de Pery one afternoon, filming a farmer as he prepared the soil for coca.
“I’m going to explain how to use this tool called a wallhua,” said the farmer, Jaime Mamani, 64, lifting a three-pronged rake. “There — you’ve just planted the seedling.”
To many, coca exists solely as the basis of cocaine, a plant harvested, mixed with chemicals, altered in covert labs and trafficked across the globe. But in its natural form it is something else entirely: a mild stimulant chewed, brewed and revered in Andean communities for millennia.
In fact, coca is such an integral part of the small, landlocked South American nation of Bolivia that its government is leading a campaign to press the United Nations to remove the leaf from the world’s list of most dangerous drugs.
The U.N. classifies coca alongside fentanyl and heroin as “highly addictive and liable to abuse.” The United States has long opposed any changes, warning it would make it easier to expand cocaine production. In Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer, Washington has spent billions on eradication and counternarcotics operations — even as output continues rising.
The results of a formal U.N. review are expected by March.
Removing the coca leaf from the dangerous-drug list would free countries that have signed a U.N. convention on drugs from their requirement to criminalize coca. (Bolivia has been exempted from that rule.) Downgrading coca to a less restrictive category could still open the way for legal trade, scientific research and industrial development.
But it is far from certain the United Nations will make any changes at all.
Proponents argue that the leaf itself is not inherently harmful, and that equating it with cocaine criminalizes a cornerstone of Andean Indigenous heritage.
A draft report by the World Health Organization, the U.N.’s public health agency, concluded that coca had very low potential for dependence and posed no major health risks.
Still, some vendors in Bolivia sell coca leaves mixed with stimulants like caffeine called “reloaded coca,” and local journalists have documented potential health risks of these unregistered products.
Bolivia’s efforts to change the coca leaf’s legal status may be affected by the runoff presidential election on Oct. 19. That contest is between two conservative candidates, and it is unclear whether either would champion coca as strongly as the leftist governments that have ruled for two decades.
Farmers in designated zones cultivate coca in Bolivia to sell in state-run markets. Cocaine is produced in Bolivia, but its output ranks behind Colombia and Peru; much of the country’s coca is grown for traditional, legal use.
And coca is everywhere in Bolivia: slipped into tea bags in upscale hotels, sold from street kiosks in flavors like orange and watermelon, chewed by drivers on long hauls, even placed in bowls on government officials’ desks.
That ubiquity is relatively recent. The push to rip up crops that had sustained Indigenous communities for centuries as part of the U.S.-led war on drugs bred resentment and political mobilization, helping to propel the rise of Evo Morales, a coca growers’ union leader who in 2006 became Bolivia’s first Indigenous president.
Mr. Morales made the plant central to his agenda. Under the banner of “Coca Yes, Cocaine No,” his government promoted traditional and modern uses, including coca tea, flour, toothpaste and other products, while still pledging to combat cocaine trafficking.
His government enshrined coca as part of the nation’s cultural heritage in the 2009 Constitution, underscoring Indigenous identity and resistance to foreign drug policies. In 2012, Bolivia withdrew from the United Nations’ agreement on drugs, but it rejoined the following year after the U.N. granted an exemption allowing coca use within Bolivia’s borders.
Bolivia passed a law in 2017 regulating cultivation, trade and consumption, formalizing a legal domestic market.
“When I was a child, it was very frowned upon,” said Omar Pintones, 36, a coordinator for the government agency that oversees the coca industry. “Coca leaf consumption was for lower-class people. So there was often that element of shame.”
Today, he added, “many professionals, lawyers, doctors, people at universities, people in all walks of life,” use coca leaves.
In San José de Pery, a five-hour drive from the capital of La Paz, residents are proud of their coca work. Farmers rise as early as 3 a.m., tending plants that take three to four months to mature. Harvested leaves are dried, bundled and sold to distributors who supply retailers across Bolivia.
The government sets a limit of roughly 54,000 acres nationwide for the legal cultivation of coca to help keep prices high for local farmers. The industry generates direct and indirect employment for tens of thousands of families.
Luis Arce, who succeeded Mr. Morales as president in 2020, has taken Bolivia’s case to remove coca from the list of the most perilous drugs to the World Health Organization. An agency spokesman said its assessment would balance “the harms versus potential benefits” of the coca leaf, while also determining how easily it can be turned into cocaine.
The Vice Ministry of Coca and Integral Development, a uniquely Bolivian institution, oversees the country’s coca industry. Bolivians in traditional Indigenous clothing routinely fill its hallways to renew their coca licenses.
Mr. Pintones, who works for the ministry, said he and many of its employees come from coca-growing families and pushed to legalize coca.
“I have eaten, grown, dressed, studied, and supported my family thanks to the coca leaf,” he said. “I consume coca leaves daily here at work and in my daily life. And I have never gone crazy or lost consciousness.”
The ministry is collaborating with companies experimenting with new products — coca soda, ice cream, ointments, syrups and soaps — as well as with universities to study the leaf.
Studies suggest coca may help increase alertness and lower blood pressure. Research has also pointed to antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects that could help fight infection.
If the United Nations decides to loosen restrictions on the coca leaf, and other nations move to decriminalize, that could open a market for global trade in coca products.
“Coca leaves have generated many jobs in Bolivia,” Mateo Mamani, Bolivia’s vice minister of coca, said in an interview, and being able to export the coca leaf would “generate good income for the state.”
Researchers in Bolivia are conducting more studies on coca derivatives and their potential health benefits.
“That’s what we want the world to understand,” Mr. Mamani said. “Yes it is used for illicit purposes, but if we look at the coca leaf in a positive light, we can get a lot out of it.”
In Colombia and Peru, traditional coca use is also constitutionally protected, but it is not as ubiquitous as in Bolivia.
Supporters of removing coca leaf from the U.N.’s list say separating traditional use from cocaine trafficking is feasible because tightly regulated legal markets could be closely monitored.
U.S. officials argue that even if the leaf itself is relatively harmless, it is still the raw material for cocaine, and recognizing or legalizing coca internationally could weaken efforts to suppress cultivation and make enforcement harder. The Trump administration has cited cocaine trafficking to justify its attacks on boats officials say leave Venezuela bound for the United States.
But even if an international coca market were to open, some critics said they worry that the greatest profits would be reaped by large corporations, and the windfall would not trickle down to Indigenous communities.
Sdenka Silva, a Bolivian sociologist who has worked with coca farmers, founded the Museum of Coca, a small building nestled among backpacker hostels in central La Paz that educates visitors about the plant’s 8,000-year history among Indigenous communities.
When cocaine was legal in many countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she said, colonial powers like the Dutch cultivated coca in what is now Indonesia at a lower cost than elsewhere, undercutting the industries in Peru and Bolivia.
“I’m afraid that something like that will happen with big companies,” she said.
But coca’s champions are hopeful.
“This should not be political,” Mr. Arce, the outgoing president, who is not seeking re-election, said in an interview. “The coca leaf is not a narcotic.’’
Genevieve Glatsky is a reporter for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.
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