Colombia is known for a number of things like coffee, Pablo Escobar and well, cocaine. And just recently, there is a controversial bill that’s been attempting to get through Colombia’s legislature to end its ‘War on Drugs.’ While this doesn’t seem so surprising, it’s what the bill is proposing that makes it so taboo. The bill is determined to end the war by legalizing cocaine and placing it under government regulation.
Backed by the leftist opposition and its centrist allies, this bill means to put a stop to the infamous war on drugs and rather put into effect counter-narcotics strategies and place evidence-based policies that will aid in curbing drug abuse.
For almost fifty years, Colombia has suffered under its anti-drug policy which criminalizes the coca leaf and yet, the drug trafficking organizations, death squads, and illegal armed groups have just grown steadily and stronger over the past half-century in their attempts to rule over the coca leaf cultivation and production of cocaine.
This new proposed bill suggests decriminalizing cocaine and having the state buy the entire coca harvest within the country and rather produce it under a legal industry, supplying those that use cocaine for pain relief rather than for recreational use. The policy also recommends that the state would provide raw materials to the indigenous artisans so that they can formulate foods, tea, baking flour and medicinal products using the coca plant.
Those that support the bill are hopeful that it can help bring the hundreds of thousands of illegal coca farmers out from the hidden black market that is run by violent armed groups and cartels, and rather into a government-regulated, safe and homegrown legal industry.
One such supporter, Senator Ivan Marulanda of the centrist Green Alliance, spoke with Vice world News, “This policy would mean cutting organized crime off from the coca leaf, and it would cut consumers off from organized crime.”
He added, “The Colombian state would distribute it to users under a public health program, effectively through physicians who would evaluate if a person is apt for taking cocaine for their pain. And then it would be high-quality cocaine.”
Marulanda also said, “Another important thing here is that not all consumers are addicts. Less than 10 percent of cocaine consumers are addicts.”
The use and consumption of the coca leaf has been a part of the social and cultural traditions of the native peoples of the Andes for centuries. In fact, in Bolivia – which is the world’s third largest producer of cocaine – the coca leaf ‘was decriminalized through widely-hailed policies that prioritized respect for human rights and community participation.’
Senator Marulanda explained, “The war on drugs is a law-and-order policy against drugs that thinks of drugs as a criminal offense. It’s also a persecution against the coca plant, the leaves of which are used to produce cocaine.”
He continued, “That policy has not changed since the 1980s. Actually, Colombia’s drug policy has only become more entrenched, more stubborn, and more severe in its application. We’re now in the year 2020. Yet Columbia exports 90 percent of the cocaine in the world today… We’re inundated with cocaine and inundated with deaths and violence. We’ve lost sovereignty over Colombian territory to the dominion of organized criminal mafias.”
Former Colombian President, Juan Manual Santos, who reigned over the country from 2010 to 2018, has also agreed that the country truly needs a new approach to drugs. A couple of years before, President Santos participated in a study that found that such drugs like opiates, ecstasy and cocaine could actually be less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. But the problem is many of these drugs are placed on the dangerous narcotics list due to politics and cultural biases rather than actual scientific classification.
Santos even noted that the so-called classification of these drugs as dangerous or harmful narcotics is “a political decision.” He also said that Colombia is “probably the country that has paid the highest price for the war on drugs.” He even went on to say that it’s been decades where the country has suffered from an ‘unwinnable drug war’ that has caused “more damage, more harm” to themselves and to the world rather than finding a practical approach by regulating and sale and consumption of cocaine in a “good way.”
Both the experts and most of Colombia’s politicians understand that using a ‘blanket repression’ as a solution to the criminal drug cartels and overall drug use won’t necessarily work. And moreover, they also know that the bill will also get major resistance from others in Colombia, and more so from the United States, whose stance on continuing the ‘war on drugs’ has been unwavering.
The sitting Colombian President, Ivan Duque Marquez, has promised to push even harder on the war on drug in order to finally end illegal cocaine production.
In fact, just a couple of month ago, Colombian Minister of Defense, Carlos Holmes Trujillo informed Reuters that they have plans to have the military begin doing aerial fumigation over the countryside once more. This uses the herbicide glyphosate, a chemical that is incredibly harmful to the cultivation of coca leaves, which is the base ingredient of cocaine.
The practice, which was stopped in 2015 due to major concerns by the World Health Organization (WHO) that the herbicide causes cancer, and harms the environment as well. But the Duque administration claims that fumigation is necessary if they want to stop the flow of cash into the hands of the illegal armed groups. This policy of aerial fumigation is widely supported by the United States since their Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t agree that the herbicide is carcinogenic.
Senator Muralanda went on to say, “We’ve been going 40 years with a policy that costs billions of U.S. dollars with zero success and so much cost and destruction. Let’s try out this other policy. Because something that hasn’t worked in the last 40 years is something that’s just not going to work.”
In the end, the world will just have to wait and see if Colombia will ever be able to end the war on drugs.
What are your thoughts? Please comment below and share this news!
True Activist / Report a typo
