What effect does western drug policy have on Latin American culture?
Several years ago, I was, for the first time, face to face with the origins of one of the greatest evils of contemporary society. I was in Latin America and staring at an evil responsible for the deaths of millions of people, the incarceration of millions more and the degradation of western society. Given its impressive record in destruction, it seemed rather strange that this evil was stewing in the bottom of my tea cup. The evil I am referring to is the coca leaf. While my leaves were providing a concoction that would aid my battle against altitude-sickness, elsewhere ton after ton was being put through a step-by-step process of chemical adjustment that would culminate in the crystallisation of a fine powder known to the world as cocaine.
Forgotten societies
Cocaine is one constituent in the wider dilemma of drug policy in society. The problems caused by both the drugs trade and the State’s response in countries such as the US and the UK are of the extent that it dominates contemporary thought and often makes front page news. While the prohibition/legalisation debate comprehensively examines the implications for our society, it does so at the expense of another neglected dimension to this problem: the implications for the societies that satisfy our insatiable thirst for intoxication.
Symbolic leaf
To the Andean societies who have cultivated the coca leaf for thousands of years, it is an integral part of their culture. It operates as a medium of social interaction. In much the same way that colleagues buy each other pints in a pub, Andean people share coca leaves. As a symbol, it represents the resistance of indigenous people against the Spanish Conquistadores’ colonisation of the region. Catholic missionaries, who arrived after the 200 Spanish soldiers and their muskets famously eradicated the entire Inca Empire, saw the coca leaf as symbolic of the indigenous people’s pagan ancestry and were the most vociferous in objecting to its continued use.
Exploiting demand
As mentioned previously, its alleged medicinal benefits are equally important. The pleas of the Catholic missionaries at the time were ignored by the Administration because the leaf’s perceived qualities as a stimulant, alongside its ability to suppress hunger, aided the exploitation of the indigenous workforce and allowed the Conquistadores to intensify their mining and seizure of the region’s huge gold reserves. But while colonisation caused shameful levels of damage to Latin America, it pales in comparison to that caused by the cocaine trade. The western demand for cocaine, coupled with its illegality, has caused the value of the product to inflate and, for millions of impoverished Latin Americans, has made the risk of death/prosecution one worth taking. Prohibition can only intensify this problem as the tougher it becomes to import a product, the rarer it becomes and so the more valuable. This exponentially increasing value for trafficking the product allowed drug barons at the top of the chain to exert unrivalled influence over the states they trafficked within, whether it was through bribing politicians or assassinating those standing in the way of their illegal activities – actions that left many more injured or massacred in the crossfire. Such was the extent of this problem that in 1986, the main cause of death for adult males in Colombia was murder. This kind of corruption, as well as tolerance towards the drugs trade, was on a number of occasions removed through CIA-sponsored coups such as the assassination of the democratically elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the dictator Augusto Pinochet, one of many Latin leaders whose human rights abuses were tolerated by the western world, thanks to his equally oppressive approach to the drug trade.
Cultural destruction
The most shameful damage has been caused by the practise of coca eradication programmes. These have led to communities that have grown and harvested the coca leaf for at least a thousand years being forced to abandon their livelihood. Not only are they being forced to abandon a livelihood but the significance of the coca leaf within Andean cultures makes it the cultural equivalent of denying an Englishman his cup of tea! Furthermore, as a result, it has led to those that grow coca illicitly having to hide their plantations in the Amazon rainforest, a covert operation that has done irreparable and large scale damage to this complex ecosystem. Cocaine and its constituents weren’t always the scourge of the western world. Although cocaine was first isolated from coca leaves in 1855, it was not outlawed internationally until Peru and Bolivia finally signed the Single Geneva Convention Against Drugs in 1962. At the end of the 19th century, it had become the toast of the medical and pharmaceutical world following its successful use as an anaesthetic. At the peak of its popularity, it was being used to cure everything from hay fever to mental illness and was available to purchase over the counter. While most of the companies that prospered on the back of cocaine’s pre-prohibition success disappeared decades ago, one still remains. The Coca Cola Company removed cocaine from its products at the beginning of the 20th century, but it continues to import some 175,000 kilograms of coca leaves a year, the approximate 1.75 tons of cocaine this brings is extracted by a subsidiary, one of a minority of companies that has the privilege of a US-license to work with these illegal products. The US authorities are not quite so tolerant towards the more infamous reasons coca and its constituents are imported. During Reagan’s first term as president, the War on Drugs expanded from a domestic battle to an international one. An international war that has cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars, cost the lives of 56 DEAs, ruined the lives of millions more in Latin America, whether it be through interfering with a harmless ancient pastime, through US-sponsored coca-eradication programmes, or through the propping up of US-sponsored dictatorial regimes. Despite this bloodshed little has been achieved, drugs are still readily available. I am not disputing that cocaine, and especially crack cocaine, can be dreadful and damaging things but the hypocrisy of the West (the US especially) is equally damaging. Cocaine is one of the great testaments to the damage the vices of the ‘first world’ have inflicted on developing nations.
A western vice?
Take a harmless bag of coca leaves; add some western chemistry and you have the world’s favourite illicit powder. Yet, it is the very people that use coca responsibly that suffer the most at the hands of anti-drug policy, while the wealthy and the desperate drug-users of the West continue to indulge and sponsor this misery. So if, as an affluent lawyer or businessman, you should ever find yourself on the brink of dabbling in the ‘marching powder’, spare a thought for the millions that have suffered for that fix; think twice and remember the famous Latin mantra: ‘Coca not cocaine’!

Thomas Barker is in the second year of a Law LLB and President of the Debating Societyn(www.kentdebating.co.uk)