The United Nations must “decolonize” global drug laws and deschedule the coca leaf, which is used daily by millions of Andean people for nutritional, medicinal, and cultural purposes, the vice president of Bolivia told a coca summit outside of Cusco, Peru.
From February 3 to 7, policymakers, activists, scientists and Indigenous leaders gathered for the “Wisdom of the Leaf” event organized by the McKenna Academy, an ethnobotanical education nonprofit. They discussed how best to apply pressure on the UN and the World Health Organization to support reform, with the WHO due to publish its “critical” review of the evidence around the global coca ban in September.
“It is time to decolonize the convention’s current regulations and [end] the six decades of the colonization of the coca leaf,” Bolivian Vice President David Chochquehuanca told the summit.
Global coca prohibition began in 1961, long before concern over the trafficking of cocaine, the main ingredient of which is the coca leaf. Since then, the sovereignty of the principally Indigenous communities that have traditionally consumed coca in its plant form has been repeatedly violated, Chochquehuanca said. Repeal would allow those who have been discriminated against “to industrialize and commercialize the coca leaf in its natural state,” he added.
“Coca belongs to the Indigenous People.”
It would also allow the rest of the world to enjoy the benefits of a plant brimming with calcium and iron, which has analgesic properties, boosts respiration at higher altitudes and performs a similar energizing function to coffee, but with fewer side effects, anthropologist and author Wade Davis, who helped organize the summit, told attendees. “The actions of coca and cocaine are not comparable,” he said during his keynote. “Each gives a sense of wellbeing, but one assaults the senses.”
Despite coca’s apparent benefits, others cautioned against rapid commercialization, citing how corporate interests have wrested control of legal cannabis markets—notably ruining legacy-market farmers in the United States after oversupply crashed the price.
“Coca belongs to the Indigenous people,” said Fabiola Piñacué, the founder of Coca Nasa, a Colombian community-based company that manufactures coca-based products. Coca farmers, known as cocaleros, should be protected under any new, less repressive global regime—perhaps similar to how champagne, feta cheese, Colombian coffee or rooibos tea must come from their specific regions—to ensure they are paid fairly for their coca leaves, and are not undercut by growers elsewhere in the world, Piñacué said.
The fact that Coca-Cola, which derives its unique taste from a “decocainized” extract of the coca leaf, is available “in every last corner of the world,” but coca—with all of its medicinal and nutritional benefits—is globally illegal aside from in the Andean nations, is a testament to the “greed and avarice of the vulgarized West,” she added. “This drink is a poison because it is causing addiction, obesity and blood sugar problems in people.”
At the height of the global drug war in the 1990s, when vast swaths of coca fields in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador were sprayed from helicopters with glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup—since found to be a “probable carcinogen”—coca farmers were arrested, prosecuted and had their crops destroyed even when they were growing it for traditional uses, and not for the production of cocaine. Indigenous people in the sprayed areas complained of flu-like symptoms including nausea, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, respiratory problems, and skin rashes, according to a 2001 report by the Transnational Institute.
“In some way, just as they wanted to exterminate the Indigenous people, they also wanted to exterminate Indigenous culture.”
Within the Quechua-speaking communities, known collectively as Runakuna, that have consumed coca leaves for more than 8,000 years, the US-led campaign was viewed as the continuation of a Western war on Indigenous culture which began when the Spanish conquistadors arrived and denounced coca as a tool of the devil.
“For us, coca is something sacred,” said Jaison Perez Villafaña, a wisdom keeper known as a mamo, from Colombia’s Arhuaco community. “In some way, just as they wanted to exterminate the Indigenous people, they also wanted to exterminate Indigenous culture.”
Rather than as merely a plant with medicinal and pleasurable properties, Villafaña described coca as a portal to a cosmovision that is central to the way of life of his people, and many others.
“When we talk about culture, you feel like you own it because you talk to coca, you live with coca, you travel with coca, you heal with coca, you travel spiritually with coca,” he said. While cocaine is associated with the violence tied to the drug trade under prohibition, he continued, coca is a symbol of peace and brotherhood in Indigenous communities. “The world of the white brother sees that it is a bush that kills, but it is not to blame; the fault is of man. The bush is sacred, the bush is medicinal.”
When people pass each other in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of Colombia, from where Villafaña hails, it is customary to exchange a handful of leaves as a mark of respect and greeting. Therefore, to deny Runakuna the right to consume coca is tantamount to cultural genocide, Davis said, referencing his essay on coca in his 2024 collection Beneath The Surface of Things. Hence the motto of the Peruvian pro-coca movement: coca o muerte (coca or death).
Piñacué said it was paramount to create a movement to increase understanding around the coca leaf, with efforts already underway ahead of the WHO review.
The eradication campaigns across the Andes have mostly quietly ended in recent years, but the 1961 drug control treaty remains in place, requiring the “uprooting of all coca bushes which grow wild” and banning the distribution of any products containing the plant, which can only become cocaine following a chemical process. This leaves farmers vulnerable to price fluctuations in the global cocaine trade; many are nonetheless understood to prefer not to deal with those turning it into cocaine.
That there remains a war on coca is clear. Over the last decade, in Spain, more than a dozen Andean migrants have been taken to trial for possession of coca leaves and four received criminal records. In 2018 the captain of the Peruvian soccer team, Paolo Guerrero, was initially banned from the sport for 12 months after testing positive for a metabolite of cocaine, despite his protestations that he had only drunk a small amount of coca tea. In 2020, border authorities in Philadelphia celebrated the seizure of 12 pounds of “green cocaine”—in fact it was a type of coca powder named mambé, which would be near-impossible to convert into cocaine.
Piñacué said that it was paramount to create a movement to increase understanding around the coca leaf, with efforts already underway through side events and art installations at the UN ahead of the publication of the WHO review later in 2025.
Depending on the findings of that review, a Commission for Narcotic Drugs vote could follow in March 2026. That might lead to the down-scheduling or descheduling of the plant.
“The coca leaf is alive and has its own spirit,” Piñacué said. Whatever happens next at a global level, she added, many indigenous people in the Andes, not least those from her own Nasa community in Colombia, will continue chewing the leaf. “It is part of the people.”
Photograph of coca leaves by Nils R. Barth via the Museum of Native American History/CCO Public Domain
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