major international disagreement with wide-ranging implications for global drugs policy has erupted over the right of Bolivia’s indigenous Indian tribes to chew coca leaves, the principal ingredient in cocaine. Bolivia has obtained a special exemption from the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the framework that governs international drugs policy, allowing its indigenous people to chew the leaves. Bolivia had argued that the convention was in opposition to its new constitution, adopted in 2009, which obliges it to “protect native and ancestral coca as cultural patrimony” and maintains that coca “in its natural state ... is not a dangerous narcotic.”
What does Bolivia’s constitution say?
That coca should be protected Bolivia does not allow the consumption of dangerous drugs That it accepts the decisions of the 1961 Convention on Drugs That consumption of drugs, but not their distribution, is legal