Colombia, whose president, Gustavo Petro, is a vocal critic of the US-led warfare on medicine, has urged the UN to take away coca – the primary ingredient in cocaine – from a listing of dangerous substances.
Used not just for cocaine, the coca leaf can also be chewed as a stimulant in nations similar to Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, or brewed right into a tea thought to fight altitude illness.
Colombia’s overseas minister, Laura Sarabia, in an deal with to the UN’s fee on narcotic medicine in Vienna, insisted on Monday that the leaf “is itself not dangerous to well being”.
Eradicating it from a 1961 UN record of dangerous narcotics, the place it sits alongside cocaine and heroin, would enable it for use to “its full potential in industrial functions similar to fertilisers and drinks”, she stated.
She argued that legalisation was the one approach to cease drug traffickers monopolising the plant – forcing rural communities to develop it for them, and razing forests for its cultivation.
Sarabia stated billions of {dollars} spent on the so-called warfare on medicine has completed nothing to cease consumption, manufacturing and trafficking.
In actual fact, she stated, the variety of leisure customers of cocaine elevated by greater than 50 million in a decade.
Colombia is the world’s primary producer of cocaine – a lot of its manufacturing within the palms of drug cartels and violent guerrilla teams.
In 2023, the South American nation set a brand new file final yr for coca leaf cultivation and cocaine manufacturing, which rose 53% from 1,738 tonnes (1,915 US tons) to 2,600 tonnes, in response to the UN.
The US is the most important cocaine shopper.
Petro, the nation’s first leftist president, has tried to alter the strategy to combating drug trafficking to focus extra on prevention amongst potential customers, and discovering various incomes for coca farmers.
Final month, he raised some eyebrows when he stated that cocaine “isn’t any worse than whisky” and is barely unlawful as a result of it comes from Latin America.
“If you would like peace, it’s important to dismantle the enterprise [of drug trafficking],” he stated throughout a authorities assembly. “It may simply be dismantled in the event that they legalise cocaine on this planet. It could be bought like wine.”
Sarabia on Monday insisted that altering the strategy from a punitive one in direction of a extra humanitarian one didn’t suggest “normalising or coexisting with drug trafficking”.
Colombian authorities have seized greater than 1,900 tonnes of cocaine and destroyed 454 clandestine laboratories since Petro took workplace in August 2022 as much as January this yr, stated the minister.
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