Chewing coca at the UN

UPDATE - TNI posted an open letter to HCLU (if you follow this link you can read it). Here is HCLU's response to the letter:

First of all, we would like to confirm that HCLU supports the reclassification of coca leaf. Actually we have never said anything else,  I think our earlier video (Coca leaf: the heritage of the Andes) shows our position quite well. We have great sympathy to the case Morales has been advocating for many years, that is, to give back the dignity to the native people of Bolivia and end zero-coca policies in Latin-America. We don't have any problems with this - what we say is it would be wiser to put this struggle to an international context and point out the anomalies in the international drug control system that led to the prohibition of plants like coca in the first place. That is, to point to the elephant in the room.

Yes, Morales is asking for the revision of the Single Convention with regard to coca leaf - but in his speech he didn't say there is any problem with the Single Convention itself, or the mechanisms of the UN drug control system, he claims this is a good system to tackle other drugs - he only says it was a mistake to put coca to the list of narcotics. What is more, he suggests that coca is not even a drug, only food and medicine - that is, different from drugs like tobacco, caffeine or cannabis.

Second, we have never claimed that Bolivia as a UN member state does not play a positive role at the CND meetings, or it does not support harm reduction when it comes to resolutions. But in our blog we did not focus on the role Bolivia as a state played at the CND, nor even on domestic policies in the country - we were talking only about the speech Morales gave in Vienna, we focused on his message. Actually if the president of the Netherlands or Hungary makes such a speech we would voice the same concerns. The president’s speech got the most media coverage from this event, so it would have been an excellent opportunity to show that Bolivians suffer from the symptoms of the same system that makes IDUs in Russia or imprisoned marijuana users in the US, or communities harmed by violence in Mexico suffer. All these problems are interrelated and they are the symptoms of the same failed global framework to deal with drugs and deal with people who grow some plants or use some drugs. I think a strong speech from Morales would have been much more important than any resolutions or "interpretative statements" (with unknown fate in the future).

Morales is not only a coca grower anymore - if he would be so, our criticism had been really off the mark, as TNI claims. But he is a president of a country now, he is a politician, and this requires a much broader political perspective, to look at drug policy in an international and multisectoral context. Of course we don't except him to call for legalization or the total withdrawal of the international conventions, not even to advocate for substitution treatment in Russia - but we expect him to at least mention that there are significant unintended consequences of the global drug control system, that it has a key importance for Latin-Americans how the demand for cocaine is tackled in so called consumer countreis, or to point out the similarities between the problems of Bolivia and other producer countries, regardless of the plant they produce. If a European politician makes a key speech and he says that actually this system fits for purpose in general, the only problem is the lack of harm reduction (with no attention to forced eradication of coca for instance), it would be the same mistake.

We think the key to the success of the drug policy reform movement is to realize how dependent we are on each other, how similar problems we face globally - to find common goals and create alliances. Short sighted attitudes are often present in other groups as well (eg. cannabis legalization advocates who solely advocate for legalizing cannabis as a universal panacea, or some HIV advocates who don't care supply side problems only focus on harm reduction among IDUs). Too many parallel universes, no common language, no common understanding: that's the real challenge we drug policy reform advocates face.

We admire TNI's great efforts to change drug policies in the globe and remain supporters of Morales' struggle to reclassify coca leaf.