Tradition Trumps the Treaty: Bolivia Repeals its Ban on Coca

[Judi Lynn]

Tradition Trumps the Treaty: Bolivia Repeals its Ban on Coca
Wednesday 17 August 2011
by: Natalia Cote-Muñoz, Council on Hemispheric Affairs | News Analysis
On June 29, 2011, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Aymara Indian president, withdrew his country from the United Nation’s (UN) 1961 Vienna Convention on Narcotic Drugs. His decision was based on the fact that the Convention contradicted Bolivia´s 2009 Constitution, which aims to repeal the current ban on coca chewing, a long held tradition in Bolivia. This bold move puts indigenous rights in the limelight and underlines the anachronistic and discriminatory nature of the 1961 Convention, as well as the need to revisit this treaty in order to create a more appropriate international law directed towards coca chewing.

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs

The UN’s 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs based its views on coca leaf prohibition on the Report of the Commission of Inquiry on the Coca Leaf prepared by ECOSOC (United Nation’s Economic and Social Council) in 1950. This report was “sharply criticized for its poor methodology, racist connotations, and cultural insensitivity.”<1> For example, it claims that coca chewing leads to a lack of productivity in the work environment because indigenous coca chewing communities in Lucre had a poorer job “performance” when compared with non-coca chewing regions.<2> The report did not exactly specify how performance was measured, or even whether coca chewing was actually the cause of this lack of productivity. The document simply assumed that coca chewing was the cause for the decline in performance. Although Bolivia did not originally ratify the Convention, it later did so under the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in 1976. The Convention merely went on to urge countries to prohibit the use of “Schedule IV” drugs—a category reserved for the most dangerous drugs, such as cannabis and heroin. Meanwhile, coca leaves were only designated to the supposedly less dangerous “Schedule I” category, although it is believed that they would eventually become prohibited. This designation, due to the traditional classification of coca leaf chewing under Article 49 allowed coca to be decriminalized in restricted areas for a maximum of 25 years after the convention was ratified.<3> Bolivia signed the convention in 1976, thus making coca leaf chewing legal until 2001.

Convention and Constitution in Conflict

Despite the limitations put in place by the Convention, President Morales pushed forward a new Constitution that legalized the chewing of coca leaves in 2009. Under Article 384 of this new Constitution, the coca leaf is considered to be “a cultural heritage, a natural and renewable resource of biodiversity in Bolivia, and a factor of social cohesion.”

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/tradition-trumps-treaty-bolivia-repeals-its-ban-coca/1313592894

[Peace Patriot]

1. Oh, I do love Evo Morales and the Indigenous majority in Bolivia for throwing this big monkey wrench

into the Washington War Profiteer 'Consensus' that plants must die and, if thousands of poor peasants get poisoned and murdered in the process, all the better.

The U.S. "war on drugs" is EVIL and has spread this evil into the UN and all over the world.

THANK YOU, BOLIVIA, FOR TAKING UP THIS FIGHT FOR ALL LIFE ON EARTH!

:applause: :bounce: :grouphug: :bounce: :applause:

[EFerrari]

2. Go, Evo!

:applause:

[gbscar]

3. With some luck this will mark the beginning of the end, rather than the end of the beginning.

Bolivia's example should be followed even in countries where indigenous groups aren't the cultural or social majority. Why? Because the prohibition of the coca leaf in particular and even of its derived "hard" drugs has not done us any good.

So many lives have been sacrificed and so many resources have been spent worlwide but especially in Latin America as a result of this "war on drugs" and prohibition as a whole, which has never worked and even at its best depends on a senseless puritan motivation: legislating morality instead of actual public welfare.

At its worst, we really are just seeing the rich get richer in the name of greed as they profit from this fiasco.