This week, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended that the coca leaf remain a Schedule I substance within international drug control conventions. The decision, which was first initiated nearly three years ago at the Bolivian state’s request, comes after a lengthy critical review of global evidence of the plant’s effects, traditional use, and convertibility into cocaine hydrochloride.
The WHO’s decision to maintain coca’s prohibition has been met with anger, disappointment and frustration by many drug policy experts and communities that have cultivated the coca leaf for hundreds of years.
What does the WHO decision say?
The WHO’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD), which conducted the review, said that the primary reason for maintaining the coca leaf’s scheduling was due to its convertibility into cocaine, another Schedule I substance. It seems like the judgement is more about the simplicity and high yield process of converting coca leaves into cocaine hydrochloride, than about the harms of the coca leaf itself.
Another key reason given by the ECDD were the alleged public health risks that could arise from de- or re-scheduling the coca leaf. Again, this was linked to the leaf’s convertibility into cocaine – with the WHO commenting more on the health risks arising from cocaine’s consumption, rather than of the coca leaf.
Reading just the report’s health concerns, it would seem it’s assessing cocaine, rather than the coca leaf. It notes that coca leaf dependency is very low: one study notes only around 2% of those who chew or drink it (as a tea) develop some form of addiction. But the health harms from cocaine production are too closely linked with the coca leaf for them to be seen as two separate drugs, regardless of the different contexts in which they’re used.
Martin Jelsma, Director of Drugs and Democracy at the Transnational Institute, which has written extensively about the WHO coca’s rescheduling process, criticised the WHO’s decision to equate coca with cocaine.
“It is unacceptable that the WHO simply states that coca has to stay in Schedule I because cocaine can be extracted from the leaf. Nobody has ever questioned that, but the countries that asked for this review have argued in detail why that is not a legitimate reason for maintaining the criminalisation of millennia-old Andean-Amazon traditional and contemporary cultural practices, for which the WHO bears significant historical responsibility.”
Steve Rolles, Senior Policy Analyst of Transform, agreed.
“The recommendation doesn’t fit with the committees own analysis – which clearly found that coca leaf was not associated with any significant health harms – certainly not equivalent to other drugs in schedule 1 like heroin and fentanyl,” he said. “Coca production to make cocaine would also remain criminalised.”
A historical racist and colonial error
The coca leaf has been a controlled substance since the beginning of the United Nations’ global efforts to standardise drug control. As TNI has explored in the lead up to this week’s decision, the coca leaf’s original ban was a concerted push to define it as an addiction to eradicate. A 1950 report by the UN Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf highlighted that coca chewing – the primary method through which it’s consumed – was not a form of addiction, but a habit with little to no dependency forming. Only due to later reports did the WHO come to define coca-chewing as “cocainism”, an addictive behaviour that thus warranted criminalisation under the 1961 Single Convention on Drugs.
Since then, coca eradication has been a foundational target of the international drug prohibition system for over six decades. By plane or by hand, millions of litres of the carcinogenic herbicide glyphosate have been sprayed across the Andean rainforest to destroy coca plantations. From 2002 to 2022, almost 2.6 million hectares of coca bushes were eradicated by law enforcement or substitution programmes just in Colombia – an area roughly the size of Rwanda.
While the environmental and human costs of this campaign are difficult to quantify, the mission has clearly failed. Not only is coca leaf grown in an unprecedented scale today, the amount of cocaine powder produced from the plant has also exponentially increased. In 2023, a record amount of 3,708 tons of cocaine were made; the number of cocaine consumers worldwide has also jumped, with around 25 million people estimated to have used it that year, up from 17 million 10 years earlier.
“What no-one seems to point out is that most of the increase in cultivation and cocaine production is driven by the exponential growth of cocaine seizures these past five years”, Jelsma added.
“A record of more than 2,000 metric tonnes have been seized, which largely explains the increased production: the losses had to be compensated.”
What drove the WHO’s coca decision?
As Rolles put it, “Violent drug war populism is having a moment”, best exemplified by America’s renewed, rebranded American war on “narco-terror”, whose main target is international, mostly South American, drug traffickers. US troops, strategically amassed across the Caribbean Sea, have sunk dozens of boats carrying alleged drug traffickers off in extrajudicial killings. Europe, too, having reconstituted its EU Monitoring Agency reform into a Drugs Agency, and publishing a Drug Strategy which sees harm reduction as crime prevention, is showing its new interest in addressing changing drug markets with its own physical forces.
Faced with an unprecedented funding crisis, primarily driven by growing Western disinterest in foreign aid and global diplomacy, the international organisation needs to prove its relevance to its member-states.
“UN Institutions, in the middle of a massive restructuring… are even more risk averse than normal, and anything that might be misrepresented as legalising cocaine or enabling its production would be seen as ‘rocking the boat’,” Rolles commented.
Jelsma echoed this sentiment, commenting that the WHO “just wanted to find an easy escape to avoid the political controversy they knew would be unleashed if they would have recommended otherwise.”
Sadly, keeping the status quo means dismissing evidence of historical failures to maintain prohibition – no matter the cost.
Who is harmed by the WHO’s coca decision?
Many communities cultivating the plant and exploring alternative uses for it (beyond cocaine production) are likely to be the most disheartened by this decision. Artists and indigenous communities have underscored coca’s uses in gastronomy, textiles and more. These exploratory uses have happened at the margins of society; they can only be eternal pilots while the plant remains criminalised.
Coca’s prohibition continues to harm the planet. Coca plantations are creeping into rainforests, leaving jagged patches of empty deforested land that is swiftly occupied by cattle grazers. Illegal coca cultivation (and cocaine production) not only causes deforestation, but it also funds other connected crimes, from land grabbing to illegal logging, mining, and more.
Communities living off coca cultivation are threatened by violence, price controls by illegal actors, and no possible way to have their work legally recognised by the state. Those advocating for coca’s reform or encouraging their communities to implemented state-led crop substation programmes are often killed. Those safeguarding coca’s ancestral use remain ignored by the international community
The Provincial Federation of Campesinos from Yanatile Lares (FEPCACYL), representing Peruvian coca cultivators, issued a statement condemning the WHO’s decision for ignoring the collective rights of the South American indigenous communities, and for perpetuating a racist and colonial system that criminalises ancestral practices and Andean-Amazonic cultures.
FEPCACYL called for the WHO to revise its assessment by recognising the leaf’s cultural, biodiverse and genetic value, as well as a clear distinction between its traditional uses and its use for criminal purposes.
“By recommending that coca leaf remain in Schedule I of the 1961 Single Convention, the WHO is disgracefully upholding the continued criminalisation of the millions of people in the Andean-Amazonian region who use coca, including Indigenous peoples for whom coca is sacred and plays a central role in their cultural and communal life,” John Walsh, Director for Drug Policy at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said.
“Upholding the drug treaties’ criminalisation of coca also calls into question the WHO’s stated commitment to inclusion of and respect for Indigenous rights.”
What comes next?
Coca growing countries need to seriously consider whether international drug control mechanisms are still fit for purpose.
“The critical review of the coca leaf, a process Colombia supported, was an opportunity to use the system’s own mechanisms to correct the historical error of classifying coca as a dangerous substance,” Isabel Pereira Arana, Senior Coordinator from Colombian research and advocacy organisation Dejusticia, noted.
“Colombia will have to seriously question whether remaining part of the global prohibition system, whose own mechanisms are insufficient for reform, is still necessary, or whether this system is simply obsolete and beyond hope of reform.”
Rolles noted that most Andean countries have borne the human, economic and environmental costs of fighting a violent drug war. When those same nations bear the bloody evidence of its costs, ignoring them only adds insult to injury.
“[Key Andean countries] have in good faith attempted to reform the system to make it more just and effective. It seems likely now that they will be considering more radical action in the form of defections from the global drug control regime.”
This radical action could be a withdrawal from international drug control treaties in some capacity. Bolivia did this by leaving and re-accessing the 1961 Single Convention on Drugs in 2013 to protect coca chewing, formalising its domestic coca market from 2017 onwards.
This could also mean a new treaty among interested nations. Rolles suggested that interested countries (like Andean coca-producing nations) could unite and collectively propose an inter se modification to the international drug control treaties to legally regulate domestic coca markets. While technically allowed, this move would seriously destabilise the global drug control system – which may be needed for it to remain relevant.
Until then, those working with coca will continue defending it.
“FEPCACYL will keep working to defend the dignity of our people, of our rural economy and the scientific truth that the WHO has decided to ignore.
EDIT 10/12/25: Correction and edit on the historic section of coca to better describe that the WHO altered its understanding of what constitutes an addiction to qualify coca chewing as an addiction; and to add Jelsma’s comment on the record amount of coca seized.
