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 was the purpose of the 1961 Convention on Drugs?
Regulating international policy on drugs Discussing whether indigenous people in Bolivia should be allowed to chew coca leaves Discussing the legal status of Bolivia’s constitution Negotiating extradition agreements for drug traffickers