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Headlines : InternationalMorales Takes Coca Campaign to U.N.
Evo Morales is in the middle of challenging the U.S. enforced – and as he puts it, ‘eurocentric’ – War on Drugs. As he has told the UN, there is a massive difference between coca and cocaine while in any case the problem of drug use in developed nations cannot be solved by defoliating forests and criminalizing the rural poor of Latin America.
Yet Evo also went further, opening up a new and critical avenue in the war-against-the-war on drugs:
He urged industrialised countries to take steps against the private banking industry that is responsible for moving “millions and billions of dollars” of drug money from one country to another.
Now that would be something to see…
[Posted By Szamko]Republished from IPS News
Bolivian President Evo Morales is telling the world what he says it has been unwilling to acknowledge for the past half a century — that coca is not the same as cocaine.
“This is coca,” he said, taking a leaf from his jacket pocket and displaying it to the world leaders who packed the United Nations General Assembly hall Wednesday. “This is not cocaine.”
Defending the right of indigenous communities in his country to grow coca, he called for changes in international efforts to counter the global illicit drug problem, which mainly focus on the destruction of the crop instead of controlling the demand for narcotics.
To Morales, the coca leaf does not merely provide a livelihood for indigenous communities in the Andean region, but it is also used for religious and medical purposes.
“It is part of our national identity,” he told IPS at a news conference. “It represents the community and its collectivity for the indigenous people….
Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.
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Yay! Get the “Eurocentric” rubric out there and superglue it to the arse of the transnational banking business and their money laundering and capital flight programs.
OPEN QUOTE (to add the next few paragraphs)
“The treaty is very, very clear on coca leaf,” said Melvyn Levitsky, a member of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), following the release of a global study on the use and production of narcotics.
PAUSE well, Mel, the treaty (circa 1961) is very clearly just wrong. Continuous improvement, that’s the ticket . . .
GO GO GO
The Bolivian president countered the U.N. position by arguing that the consensus on coca is largely based on Eurocentric studies conducted between 1949 and 1952.
. . . more recent studies show opposite results, he said.
“Coca does not harm human health,” he told IPS, citing a [1975] study by Harvard University which he said concluded that coca leaf “is the best food in the world. They (researchers) not only recommend chewing it, but eating it.”
END OF QUOTE
Good god Shazam, that article is ANCIENT