Culture - Bolivians seek world market for coca cures

[Alfa]

A few months old, so nowt news, but still interesting:


Lola Almudevar, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, October 7, 2007

Bolivia - Among the many brick buildings along a bleak plain in this impoverished city, four brothers mix medicinal syrups and creams from coca leaf, the raw ingredient of cocaine.


"It was the knowledge I took from my grandmother that made me see coca's commercial potential," said Prudencio Ticona, general manager of Ingacoca, a company that produces coca-derivative products. "I remember standing at her side when she fractured her arm. She took coca leaves and mixed them with herbs to make a dressing. She never went to the doctor."

Although the high-calcium, vitamin-rich coca has been chewed for centuries in Bolivia to relieve altitude sickness, toothaches and exhaustion, Ticona and his three brothers are commercializing the leaf in products they claim treat rheumatism, diabetes, muscular pains and asthma.
After nearly 20 years in business, Ingacoca eked out only $4,000 in 2006. But if Bolivia President Evo Morales has his way, the Ticona brothers and others could find lucrative markets overseas. Morales has long lobbied to overturn the 1961 U.N. Convention on Narcotics that allows the industrialization of coca only for domestic use and outlaws its production, manufacture and trade for export. The ban places coca leaf in the same category as cocaine and heroin.
Morales envisions an international market for coca's many legal products used in Bolivia now, including toothpaste, tea, cosmetics, gum, soft drinks, wine and even cookies. He has asked the European Union to gauge the size of the legal coca market and Cuban scientists to study the leaf's pharmaceutical value.
Morales, a former coca farmer and union leader, hopes the EU study, which will begin this month and end 18 months later, will vindicate his decision to increase this year's coca leaf production from 29,652 acres to 49,421 acres. Because there are thousands of Bolivian farmers who make their living growing coca, he says commercializing coca is a necessity.

"We were accused of being drug traffickers and cocaine dealers; we put up with a lot, but ... now we are defending coca," Morales told The Chronicle.
But the new policy worries U.S. officials, who argue Morales is undermining Washington's war on drugs. Bolivian coca production is still well below its mid-1990s peak but has rebounded in recent years. Bolivia remains the world's third-largest producer of cocaine after Colombia and Peru.
"Anyone who has worked in Latin America remembers the problems in Bolivia in the '80s when it was virtually a narco state. And no one wants to see Bolivia return to that because it took years and years to roll it back," said Anne Patterson, U.S. assistant secretary for international narcotics, at a press briefing in March.

The increasing influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is another factor that worries U.S. policymakers. Chavez has financed three factories that will produce coca tea and coca baking flour for the Venezuelan market.
But the EU study is key. Even the Morales government concedes that it will be forced to eradicate the added acreage if the report negates coca's commercial potential.

Morales has also shifted the war on drugs away from poor coca farmers, whose crops were forcibly removed by soldiers. Between 1997 and 2006, there were 64 deaths and 840 injuries during past eradication programs sponsored by U.S. aid.
Now, the emphasis is on drug traffickers and their laboratories, chemicals and processing pits. In the primary coca growing area called the Chapare, the government now allows farmers to grow coca on one cato, or about one-third the size of a football field. To keep farmers from going over the limit, the state offers economic incentives and free medicines, threatens crop and land confiscation, and exerts military pressure to seize cocaine and eradicate illegal coca fields. The one cato, Morales claims, ensures farmers of a steady income and has lessened violence against security forces. Only two farmers have been killed - both outside the Chapare area - since Morales assumed the presidency in January 2006.

"The Bolivian approach is not perfect, but it does present an alternative," said John Walsh, senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America. "They (coca farmers) are not being treated as criminals but as people who want to make a legal living, and so they are cooperating."
But behind the public squabble, the United States and Bolivia have found some common ground. Officials on both sides point to significant improvement combatting drug trafficking. Bolivian police seized 12 tons of cocaine in 2006 in contrast to just 3 tons in 2005, approximately 26 percent more cocaine base and cocaine hydrochloride than during the first nine months of 2005.

Last month, the State Department determined Bolivia has taken adequate steps against the production and sale of cocaine to stave off economic sanctions. Under U.S. law, countries that have "demonstrably failed" in efforts to combat the spread of illicit narcotics may be punished with cutoffs in aid. In 2007, U.S. aid to Bolivia reached $90 million.

But the State Department report noted discrepancies between the government's stated anti-drug policies and tolerance of coca production.
"We strongly encourage the government of Bolivia to make its No. 1 priority the reduction and eventual elimination of excess coca crops," it said. "We urge the government of Bolivia to revamp its national drug control strategy to eliminate permissiveness in licit production."
In the meantime, some analysts say Morales should be concentrating his efforts on convincing the United Nations to end the ban on legal coca products. In a typical speech, he points to the ban's exception for Coca-Cola, which has long used the non-drug alkaloids in coca leaf as a flavoring agent. The exemption rankles Morales.

"How is it that coca leaf is legal for Coca-Cola but industrialization for Bolivia and the coca leaf itself are penalized?" he said.
"Morales knows the coca issue well, but I don't think he has developed a lobbying strategy at the U.N. level and has been surprised at how difficult it is, and how little understanding there is of coca," said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, a nonprofit group that monitors drug operations in Bolivia. "Developing an effective lobby strategy should be a key objective."

Meanwhile, Prudencio Ticona is hoping the ban will eventually be overturned so he can expand his business, which now has only 10 employees.
"Coca in its natural state is good for your health," he said. "It is a long way from the chemical form of cocaine."


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...sn=001&sc=1000

[psyche]

"Coca in its natural state is good for your health," he said. "It is a long way from the chemical form of cocaine."

While that is true, I think that worldwide distribution of coca-leaves might dramatically add the numbers of home-laboratories extracting pure cocaine out of these products. That is something Uncle Sam wouldn't want happening, or even taking the risk of it. Though they haven't used that as an argument against commersialization of coca leaves, which is what confuses me. Isn't it farely doable process to extract coca, with ammonia and such? True though, that it needs a very good amount of the leaves, but still.

[Potter]

Originally Posted by psyche

While that is true, I think that worldwide distribution of coca-leaves might dramatically add the numbers of home-laboratories extracting pure cocaine out of these products. That is something Uncle Sam wouldn't want happening, or even taking the risk of it. Though they haven't used that as an argument against commercialization of coca leaves, which is what confuses me. Isn't it farely doable process to extract coca, with ammonia and such? True though, that it needs a very good amount of the leaves, but still.

With boxes of tea rarely having more then 20 grams of leaf, I can imagine someone picking up enough for chemistry would stand out like a sore thumb. Kilos of coca are hard to get when it is sold in tiny packages. Nobody regularly goes to store in the Great Nation of Canada where tea and coca powder (100g) are sold, and nobody imagines that they only have a kilo or so come in on any given week. Considering how often they are out of one or more of the various lines they carry.

It could always be tracked like pseudophed.

Nobody likes to think the time and bulk product consumption to make a few grams of cocaine would be preformed in a home lab for anything more then a novelty. Nobody also likes to think all sorts of other crazy ideas, that people are responsible drug users and crap like that.

We can only hope.

[NovoAndina]

[top]“Coca Si, Cocaina No”

The struggle to legitmize the coca leaf
<H3>by Daniel Aldana Cohen

NovoAndina added 0 Minutes and 54 Seconds later...

coroico, la paz — To reach Bolivia’s traditional coca-growing area, the beautiful Yungas valleys, I take a road that literally pierces the clouds, descending 2,000 metres in under six hours. From charcoal grey stone sprouting tufts of grass, the mountainsides grow greener and lusher, moss spreading over the rocks before giving way to wildflowers and leafy trees. When I arrive in one of the coca fields that checker the valleys surrounding the regional capital of Coroico, I meet Aurora, a sixty-five-year-old cocalera (coca grower). She harvests as we speak, her arms darting, her fingers grabbing pairs and triplets of leaves and severing them above the buds with her fingernails. “When I get the bud, too,” she explains, “the branch dries and there’s no more coca.

“Coca is my daily bread,” she continues. “I cannot survive without it. The earth here can’t produce coffee, it can’t produce rice; it only makes coca.”

Bolivians can only chew so many leaves and drink so much coca tea, however. “When we have too much coca,” one grower confided to me, “we sell the excess on the black market, and we don’t know where it goes.” He does know. Usually, it leaves the country to be processed in sophisticated labs into cocaine.

Since 2006, though, Bolivia’s government, led by former cocalero Evo Morales, has been pursuing a “coca sí, cocaína no” policy aimed at ending two decades of US-funded eradication campaigns, which have militarized swaths of the country and criminalized a traditional way of life. One of the plan’s main goals is to industrialize the coca leaf on a large scale, diverting coca into new markets at home and abroad.

Heidi Quisbert should be at the policy’s core. She’s one of a number of traditional medicine practitioners and cooks developing a range of coca products — from syrups and pomades to chocolates and energy bars to shampoos and toothpastes — sold in local markets. Rotund and friendly, she guides me through her cluttered kitchen in a modest La Paz neighbourhood. “See that new oven?” she asks. “I won it last year in Cochabamba at the coca festival — first prize for coca foodstuffs. It’s really good at keeping the temperature constant.”

For the next hour, she will be baking a cake made with green coca flour. Once finished, it will offer that distinctive coca buzz: the clarifying exhilaration of coffee crossed with the mellow endurance of green tea. Proponents of the plant point out that unless processed, it has no addictive properties or psychotic effects and is rich in minerals and vitamins. Its medicinal uses include alleviating various stomach problems and serving as a topical anaesthetic.

Quisbert’s forearms glisten as she stirs meringue into the dry ingredients — “It has to be silky, no lumps” — before pouring the gooey batter into a baking pan and sliding it into the oven. While we wait, she tells me about struggling to keep up her business. “Everyone talks; no one helps us,” she says quietly.

A hodgepodge of vice-ministries and government departments share responsibility for coca strategy, but leadership is lacking. Bureaucrats tend to laud the gumption of small-scale producers like Quisbert, then argue that no one will take Bolivia seriously if its products don’t reach a certain scale and standard. Critics respond that the government’s vision is so ambitious, it’s ignoring the expertise of those already industrializing the leaf. “The lefties in government think industrialization is a big factory with assembly lines and smokestacks,” says Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, a prominent sociologist and coca expert. “They don’t realize it can be a little grinder in your home.”Quisbert’s smile returns as she lays out the green chocolates, quinoa, and energy bars she sells at markets. “It’s all about getting people used to eating coca sweets bit by bit,” she says. Most Bolivians with the money to buy such products aren’t used to consuming coca, except as a tea.

For now, none of Quisbert’s wares can be exported, either. International law treats the coca leaf itself as a narcotic, though exceptions have been made for Coca Cola and pharmaceuticals. Thanks to a loophole, tiny amounts of coca tea and flour can now be purchased in North America at a steep price through a distributor called Reyes Avila, but only online, so every purchase can be tracked. “We’ve had many offers to sell the tea in stores, but we’re not allowed,” a woman working at Reyes Avila’s distribution plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, told me. The best hope for Bolivian producers is the European Union, whose parliament passed a resolution last April that moved it closer to opening its market to coca products. A Bolivian diplomat told me he has received ample encouragement on the issue there.

Quisbert pulls the cake from the oven, its crust golden and crisp. But we’re late for a meeting of local producers, and her mother, who has just arrived, won’t let me have a slice. Seeing the desperate look on my face, she softens her voice. “It needs to cool,” she says. I’ll just have to wait.

[HorseBucket]

What business is it of the U.S. how much coca Bolivia and Venezuela grows?

[Coconut]

Originally Posted by Skiznibbler

What business is it of the U.S. how much coca Bolivia and Venezuela grows?

Everything that happens in the world is their business, dontcha know?

[120daysofpoppy]

Bolivian police seized 12 tons of cocaine in 2006 in contrast to just 3 tons in 2005..Notice how they claim these busts and the price on American streets never go up..The stability of price is clear indication of a stockpile of cocaine in America..Uncle sam brings it in himself..Who is going to search a cia plane on a covert mission?..The tax payers of america are being taken for chumps if they believe the war on drugs is genuine..Their aim is to control everything and everyone...(Its legal to kill 770,000 innocent Iraqis but its ilegal to grow a plant.)