Thread: Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves - Brilliantly nuts

March 14, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves
By EVO MORALES AYMA
La Paz, Bolivia

THIS week in Vienna, a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs took place that will help shape international antidrug efforts for the next 10 years. I attended the meeting to reaffirm Bolivia’s commitment to this struggle but also to call for the reversal of a mistake made 48 years ago.

In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine — thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic — and ordered that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.â€

I had friends back in Canada who were from South America and they had something different to say about it. They claimed that people who lived in the mountains would chew it so they could handle the high altitudes and others chewed it to get a buzz. When I took a university class on Hispanic history they said that silver miners chewed on the leaves alot and production decreased due to it. I will try to see if I can find any references regarding the miners.