Evo Morales Says Drug Trafficking Caused by Capitalist Market

Bolivian President Evo Morales said Saturday that drug trafficking is a problem because the market in the North makes it a problem, as he outlined a new drug law that he said intends to involve the people.

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“The origin of drug trafficking is the market,” he said, adding that producers are made responsible for crimes that must be traced back to industrialized nations. Instead, both producers and consumers should share the burden and be regulated by the state.

“The government will continue to contribute to the battle against drug trafficking in the world, with people's participation,” the president said.

His strategy, however, runs contrary to the logic of “traitors” whose neoliberal laws, he said, operate on an irreconcilably different logic.

Morales said that a new drug trafficking law, to be rolled out in the coming days, will both expand legal coca leaf production and industrialization as it cracks down on illegal cocaine trafficking.

He also announced in a press conference in Cochabamba that Bolivia bought 13 civil and military radars from France to surveil illegal flights by traffickers.

While criticizing U.S. laws that criminalize coca production in Bolivia, he mentioned that the new law was dignified and respected internationally because “we do it ourselves.”

Morales has heavily criticized law 1008, a U.S. backed anti-drug law, which has resulted in soaring prison populations in the country, where even low-level trafficking attracts years of prison time. Former president Barack Obama also signed the Transnational Drug Trafficking Act, which makes it illegal to produce or distribute substances or chemical products with the knowledge or reason to believe that they end up in U.S. territory.

Bolivia passed the new drug law on Wednesday with the input of coca growers, with the goal of not only boosting legal cultivation, but also allowing the government to regulate production, the sale and distribution of the leaf. In line with a 1986 Bolivian law, 22,000 hectares will be allowed to supply Bolivia's legal coca market.

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Under Morales, Bolivia has developed schemes with coca-growing communities where farmers can grow plants up to certain legal levels while also encouraging other sustainable crop alternatives to coca.

In Bolivia, a country that has used the leaf since the times of the Incas, coca is commonly used in Indigenous medicine and to combat altitude sickness. President of Bolivia’s Chamber of Deputies, Gabriela Montaño, estimates that around 3.3 out of 11 million Bolivians currently consume coca leaves in a line with traditional methods.

Bolivian Ministers will soon travel soon to Vienna, to explain the scope of the coca leaf and the importance of the plant.