Is not harmful to health’ – Colombia calls for UN to pull cocaine’s main ingredient from its ‘harmful substances list’

Colombia has urged the UN to remove cocaine’s main ingredient from its list of harmful substances after its president said the drug is ‘no worse than whiskey.’

The country is the world’s biggest cocaine producer and exporter, with drug cartels and violent guerrilla groups sending the illegal drug to the United States and Europe.

Colombian Foreign Minister Laura Sarabia, in an address to the UN’s Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna, insisted Monday that the coca leaf, cocaine’s main ingredient, ‘is itself not harmful to health’.

Removing it from a 1961 UN list of harmful narcotics, where it sits alongside cocaine and heroin, would allow it to be used to ‘its full potential in industrial applications such as fertilisers and beverages,’ she said.

She argued that legalisation was the only way to stop drug traffickers monopolising the plant – forcing rural communities to grow it for them, and razing forests for its cultivation.

Sarabia said billions of dollars spent on the so-called war on drugs have done nothing to stop consumption, production, and trafficking.

She said, the number of recreational users of cocaine increased by more than 50 million in a decade.

Petro raised eyebrows last month after he claimed cocaine ‘is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky.’

‘Scientists have analyzed this. Cocaine is no worse than whiskey,’ he added, suggesting that the global cocaine industry could be ‘easily dismantled’ if the drug were legalized worldwide.

‘If you want peace, you have to dismantle the business (of drug trafficking),’ he said.

‘It could easily be dismantled if they legalize cocaine in the world. It would be sold like wine.’