A COMMENT to LA RAZÓN of BOLIVIA, 11th November 2006

Coca is the sacred plant of the Andes, occupies a privileged place in the cosmovision of the Andean culture and over 5000 years aggregates the indigenous communities, maintaining strong the cultural roots and being a source of health and physical and mental energy.

According with the results of scientific researches carried out in various parts of the world, it has been confirmed a wide range of nutritional and medicinal contents in Coca leaves, which is an unquestionable fundament to promote its benefits in the form of green products with Coca to be spread worldwide, from which Coca leaves can no longer be separated to be processed into drugs, that anyhow require tons of leaves in addition to chemical precursors to produce a single gram of cocaine hydrochloride, known as the white powder.

Once it stays clear the sacred and cultural values of Andean Coca and its traditional rituals, I’d say that it becomes urgent, and not only desirable, to start running the industrialization of Coca, under the control of the Andean Peoples, who must get the full economic revenues, on the base of equitable distribution to the entire population; I consider as well that there is no obstacle to the desandinization of the green Coca, in terms of marketing worldwide the green products, in which Coca is mixed with other ingredients, as an aggregate for its high nutritional power: from them Coca cannot be anymore separated to become available to the drug trafficking.

It cannot be ignored that the sacred green Coca dominates the lives of Andean Peoples since 5000 years and that until the middle of the 19th century no one has ever made drugs out of it, which means that the drug business is fed by the demand on the markets mostly in the metroplitan areas spread all over the world.

Despite an eventual elimination of all Coca plants from the Andean regions and everywhere in the world, the persistence of demand of drugs will push the growth and expansion of the illegal trafficking, given that drugs are already created synthetically in the laboratory.

Last but not least … it’s a must to call everything with the correct name:

Coca is the Andean plant and nothing else.

Coca Cola is its beloved north-American daughter.

Cocaine is one of the natural alkaloids in the leaves of Coca.

Cocaine hydrochloride is the white powder.

In fact people must pay a better attention to the proper use of language which rapidly and haphazardly conveys concepts mixed of superficiality, confusion, egoistic ignorance, generating dangerous and necrotic circles of prejudices, that will return, as a boomerang, to the detriment of Mankind and Life on the planet.