Yes to Coca And to talking about the social end economic costs of its prohibition

Dr. Trebach

Re: http://www.trebach.com/drugwar/Bolivia'sKnot.htm

The eradication of so lucrative a crop, however, had serious social and political repercussions for a desperately poor country where coca and cocaine had become a leading industry. With their losses rising into the hundreds of millions of dollars, Chapare's coca farmers, often led by Mr. Morales, protested, blocked roads and battled security forces, sometimes with fatal consequences.

We need to talk about the serious social and political repercussions of banning Coca during the time of the 1903-1914 construction of the Panama Canal and the paid rise of the Tobacco market in cigarettes. Take a look in Breecher's Licit and Illicit Drugs at when Tobacco cigarette sales skyrocketed (1906-07), right at the time (1907-92) that the U.S.D.A. and the AMA/APhA clique of Harvey Wiley in concert with William Randolph Hearst's "muckraking" writer Samuel Adams Hopkins, rallied against the "habit-forming menace" of coca, particularly when sold as a Tobacco habit cure.

Try chewing a bit of either leaf, and then swallow it. Coca will make one smile. Tobacco will make one spit up blood. This should give one a taste of their relative health effects (for instance, Coca leaf is NOT correlated with cancer-see article in Oral surgery, Oral Medicine and Oral Pathology 28 (1969) at pages 287-295, "The Effects of Coca Leaf Chewing on the Buccal Mucosa of Aymara and Quecha Indians in Bolvia" by James E. Hamner III and Oscar L. Villegas:

"In a further study of possible physiological effects, James E. Hamner III and Oscar L. Villegas examined the cheeks of coca growers for signs of cancer. They did biopsies of 36 tin miners and found the mucous membranes were swollen, gray-white, and opaque, but without signs of carcinoma or chronic ulcer. They noted that the betel-nut chewing in southern Asia, with or without Tobacco, was highly correlated with oral cancer, but that oral cancer was rare in Bolivia and Peru. They concluded that the condition they observed was not pre-malignant."

If we care anything about civil liberties let alone the public welfare, how can we remain silent about this?

Best Regards

Douglas Willinger
http://www.HighwaysAndCommunities.com/southcapitolstreet