Colombia and Bolivia will jointly ask the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs to remove coca leaves from its list of prohibited substances and accept the plant's traditional uses, Colombia's government said on Wednesday.

The proposal, which the two countries will make at the commission's session in Vienna in mid-March, is a bid to de-stigmatize conversations about the problem of drugs, Colombia's vice-minister for multilateral affairs, Laura Gil, said in a statement.

"Bolivia and Colombia consider it is the moment to once again put this issue on the table," she said. "To remove the coca leaf - the leaf, not cocaine - from the prohibited substances list."

Coca leaves are widely used in different countries in Latin America, especially by indigenous groups, to treat stomach aches and altitude sickness, among other ceremonial uses.

Colombia, Bolivia to ask UN to remove coca leaf from narcotics list

A deadly crackdown on political protests in Peru continues, as President Dina Boluarte tries to silence calls for her to resign, and Congress resists demands for new elections this year. Drowned out by the current crisis, which followed the ousting of President Pedro Castillo, is how Peruvians have lost any potential for drug policy reform—in a country where coca is produced in large quanties, and which is almost entirely without sanctioned harm reduction.

Castillo, a school teacher originally from a rural town in the northern Cajamarca region, gained national prominence for his union leadership in a 2017 teachers’ strike. Running in the 2021 presidential election on a leftist platform with the Free Peru party, he won the first round and ultimately achieved a narrow run-off victory over Keiko Fujimori—a right-wing congress member and daughter of former president and dictator Alberto Fujimori.

Peru's coca reform chance disappears amid political crisis

, moved on Friday to end sentencing disparities that have imposed different penalties for different forms of cocaine and worsened racial inequity in the US justice system.

For decades, federal law has imposed harsher sentences for crack cocaine even though it isn’t scientifically different from powder cocaine, creating “unwarranted racial disparities”, Garland wrote in a memo. “They are two forms of the same drug, with powder readily convertible into crack cocaine.”

With changes to the law stalled in Congress, Garland instructed prosecutors in non-violent, low-level cases to file charges that avoid the mandatory minimum sentences that are triggered for smaller amounts of rock cocaine.

Civil rights leaders and criminal justice reform advocates applauded the changes, though they said the changes would not be permanent without action from Congress.

US Attorney General moves to end crack cocaine sentencing disparities

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Ministry of Justice and Law present the monitoring report on territories affected by coca cultivation as of 31 December 2021, prepared by the Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System (SIMCI).

The first chapter highlights that potential cocaine production maintains the upward trend that has been registered since 2014, while the area planted with coca resumes the strong upward trend that had been present since 2014 and that was interrupted between 2018 and 2020. It indicates that this recovery of the trend is the result of the interaction of multiple structural factors that coincided with a reduction in the efficiency of interventions.

In contrast to the 2018-2020 period, coca did not only grow within the productive enclaves, as the increase was generalised; even departments that were showing a downward trend, such as Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare, showed an increase in coca cultivation. The consolidation of coca-free territories has not yet taken place, despite the fact that five departments have now had less than 100 hectares under cultivation for more than nine years.

The second chapter emphasises elements of change that boost the incentive system and can have an impact on the reactivation of the phenomenon in territories that had a tendency to abandon coca cultivation. These changes do not only affect coca growers; they also have an impact on the communities that interact with the production chain. The report highlights the changes in the roles and actors of power present in the territories, the new urban-rural relations that imply new alternatives for transforming illegal profits into goods and services, as well as the formation of productive enclaves not only related to the concentration and permanence of coca, but also to the development of other enclave characteristics in an economic sense.

Colombia - Monitoring of territories affected by illicit crops 2021

The position paper “Drug Policy in Colombia – The Road to a Just Regulation" presents the dynamics which have maintained Colombia hostage as the longest running, and most evident examples, of failed prohibitionist drug policies. The position paper explores the context leading to the 2016 Peace Agreement, as well as the shifts in political power that resulted in uneven and unsuccessful implementation efforts of the Agreement. It puts forward recommendations to support effective and humane drug policy reforms that enhance peace, health, security and development in Colombia.

Drug policy in Colombia: The road to a just regulation

Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s push for a major overhaul of the “war on drugs” is likely to cause tensions with Washington, but both sides appear to be proceeding with caution. Like its predecessors, the Biden Administration is reluctant to acknowledge the failure of the old tactics, but the burden will be on Petro to make the case that new approaches will work better.

Colombia has agreed with the United States on drug policies since the 1970s, with a focus on the Colombian Police and, later, the National Army. In 1996, the U.S. State Department said that the 

Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia

 (FARC) were directly engaged in narco-trafficking, which opened the door for deeper cooperation. With “Plan Colombia” in the 2000s, Bogotá made the war on drugs a central element of its counterinsurgency – and Washington became deeply involved despite the implications for human rights in affected regions.

The two countries put aerial eradication of coca crops and extradition of traffickers at the center of the relationship, even though the initiatives did not significantly reduce the production or flows of the narcotic into the United States. The cartels fragmented and grew more violent as they fought for control of the trade.

President Petro’s proposed reform is not the first challenge to the decades-old approach. A peace agreement between President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC in 2016 challenged the nature and depth of cooperation. The accord included commitments in four areas: incentivizing coca growers to change crops (through agrarian reform and secure access to markets); stopping the traffic (through interdiction); eliminating money-laundering; and getting transit and consumer countries to do more to reduce demand. The goal was to reduce the trade and demand more than to criminalize the production of raw material.

Colombia: Will new drug policies damage U.S. ties?

It makes no sense,” said Joe Biden on October 6th, as he 

 the 6,000 or so Americans convicted of possessing a small amount of marijuana. Although cannabis is fully legal in 19 American states, at the federal level it is still deemed to be as dangerous as heroin and more so than fentanyl, two drugs that contributed to more than 100,000 Americans dying of 

 last year. But the president’s admission applies to drug policy more broadly. Prohibition is not working—and that can be seen most strikingly with cocaine, not cannabis.

cocaine into the United States has surged

. Global production hit a record of 1,982 tonnes in 2020, according to the latest data, though that is likely to be an underestimate. That record high is despite decades of strenuous and costly efforts to cut off the supply. Between 2000 and 2020 the United States ploughed $10bn into Colombia to suppress production, paying the local armed forces to spray coca plantations with herbicide from the air or to yank up bushes by hand. To no avail: when coca is eradicated on one hillside, it shifts to another.

The worst harm falls on producing and trafficking countries, where drug profits fuel violence. Murder in Colombia is three times more common than in the United States; in Mexico, four times. In some areas, drug gangs are so wealthy and well-armed that they rival the state, giving cops and officials the choice of 

 (silver or lead): be corrupted or be killed. Prohibition also sucks children out of school, as drug gangs favour recruits who are 

Joe Biden is too timid. It is time to legalise cocaine

Organizers of a Vancouver compassion club say they will continue to distribute tested cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine despite a rejection from Health Canada, calling it the only way to save lives in the face of a toxic drug supply.

Eris Nyx, co-founder of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) — a collective of advocacy groups working to ensure a safe supply of drugs — said regulating the illicit supply is the answer to stopping drug toxicity deaths, which have topped 10,000 in British Columbia since the province declared a public health emergency more than six years ago.

"These people are our friends, our community members, people we love, people we care about very deeply and we're losing them every day. And the driving cause of these deaths is the deregulated and unpredictable illicit drug market,'' Nyx said Wednesday.

Nyx spoke at a news conference marking International Overdose Awareness Day, saying the groups are also seeking a judicial review of the Health Canada decision, on the basis that it didn't consider charter rights to life and equality.

DULF and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users requested the temporary Criminal Code exemption from Health Canada to operate a compassion club model for hard drugs last year. It was rejected July 29.

Nonetheless, Nyx said the Cocaine, Heroin and Methamphetamine Compassion Club and Fulfilment Centre has operated for one month, distributing 201 grams of drugs with no overdoses or deaths.

Vancouver club will continue to distribute hard drugs in bid to save lives, despite Health Canada rejection

During his first speech at the General Assembly as the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro said that the world’s addiction to money, oil and carbon is destroying the rainforest and its people under the excuse of a “hypocritical” war against drugs.

Mr. Petro described his country as one of the most beautiful and nature-rich in the world but said that blood also flowed into its rivers and biodiversity.

He explained that violence in the rainforest was fuelled by the prosecution of the sacred plant of the Incas: the coca plant.

“As in a paradoxical crossroads. The forest that should be saved is at the same time being destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they throw poisons such as glyphosate that drips into our waters, they arrest their cultivators and then imprison them,” he stated.

He added that destroying the Amazon has seemingly become the slogan of some States and negotiators and he denounced such “save the jungle speech” as hypocritical.

“The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you wage war and play with it. The jungle, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life. The great sponge that absorbs the planetary CO2 evaporates. The jungle is our saviour, but it is seen in my country as the enemy to defeat, as a weed to be extinguished,” he underscored.

Mr. Petro highlighted that while the developed world let the rainforest burn as an excuse for the war against drugs, it also asked for more oil, “to calm their other addiction” to consumption, power and money.

“What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil? The opinion of power has ordered that cocaine is poison and must be persecuted, while it only causes minimal deaths from overdoses…but instead, coal and oil must be protected, even when it can extinguish all humanity,” he said, adding that such reasoning was “unjust and irrational”.

“The culprit of drug addiction is not the rainforest; it is the irrationality of the world’s power. Give a blow of reason to this power. Turn on the lights of the century again”, he urged.

The President said that the war against drugs has lasted over 40 years, and it has not been won.

“By hiding the truth, they will only see the rainforest and democracies die. The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has failed,” he noted.

Mr. Petro then demanded, speaking in the name of all of Latin-America, the end of the “irrational war against drugs”.

“Reducing drug use does not require wars, it needs us all to build a better society: a more supportive, more affectionate society, where the meaning of life saves us from addictions… Do you want fewer drugs? Think of earning less and giving more love. Think of a rational exercise of power”, he told world leaders.

Mr. Petro also addressed the climate disaster and the displacement it causes, saying that wars were only excuses to not act against it.

“The climate disaster that will kill hundreds of millions of people is not being caused by the planet, it is being caused by capital. By the logic of consuming more and more, producing more and more, and for some earning more and more”, he said.

The Colombian President added that within the fires and poisoning of the Amazon rainforest was embedded a “failure of humanity”.

“Behind cocaine and drug addiction, behind oil and coal addiction, there is the true addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, profit and money. That is the huge deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity”, he explained.

Mr. Petro urged a dialogue with Latin-America to end the war, saying it was “time for peace”.

“Only in peace we can save life in our land. There will be no peace without social, economic and environmental justice. We are at war with the planet too. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations,” he concluded.

Irrational war on drugs, destruction of the Amazon, expose humanity's failures, Colombia's Petro tells UN

Report from a webinar organised by María Margarita Fontecha and Justina Walker / With the support of Silvia Sarapura, Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, University of Guelph

Approximately 41 percent of coca growers in Colombia are 19 years old or younger (Garzón et al., 2018). The high number of youth’s involvement in coca production is largely due to the fact that their families and communities have been engaged in this economic activity for generations. Coca cultivation is a threatening activity and involves many risks including army or military persecution, and violence because coca production is considered an illicit activity and has a direct relationship with illegal armed groups (Acero & Thomson, 2021). Yet, coca cropping is conducted in territories characterized by limited development where poverty and exclusion predominate. Profits from coca cultivation have not been reflected in improvement of citizen’s quality of life and their communities (Garzón et al., 2018). At present, research and policies are still far from understanding the complex realities of coca cultivators. Most of the territories where coca grows lack formal markets, infrastructure, and formal institutions arrangements. These limit the access of rural populations to resources such as credit, education, infrastructure, training, and inputs which in return contribute to insufficient skills and inputs for the cultivation of other crops.

Transitions to a sustainable agri-food system: Making rural youth visible and heard in illicit economies

'EU Drug Markets: In-depth analysis' is a strategic and action-oriented analysis of the information available on Europe's illicit drug markets. It takes a broad view of these markets from production and trafficking, to distribution and use. It provides a holistic and systemic perspective, capturing key aspects of the wider security and public health consequences of drug markets, as well as the main factors driving change and new threats.

The analysis takes a modular format and each module focuses on the market for a particular drug — thus providing a unique set of essential resources for law enforcement professionals, policymakers, the academic community and indeed for anyone seeking up-to-date information and analysis on drug markets in Europe.

EU Drug Markets: In-depth analysis

The two day event (with interpretation English/Spanish) features 20+ international, multidisciplinary speakers: scientific experts, users, entrepreneurs, drug reform advocates and policy makers providing testimonials, keynote lectures, panel & round table discussions, and plenty of Q&A opportunities for interaction with audience.


Coca leaf in medicine: lege artis on safety & therapeutics for physical & mental health.


Coca leaf and industrial products: lege artis aspects of nutrition, wellbeing, safety, innovation and process engineering.


Sustainable coca cultivation & production in fragile environments: an engine for development, not a threat


From the Andeans to the Alps: the changing landscapes of coca leaf laws.

Coca & related