Colombia is considering legalizing its massive cocaine industry

A senator is trying to get a bill through congress that makes the government buy up and sell the country’s cocaine production.

Members of the National Drug Control Directorate (DNCD) guard over 1,747 kg of cocaine from Colombia in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic on November 1, 2020. Photo by ERIKA SANTELICES, AFP via Getty Images

MEDELLÍN, Colombia - VICE World News sat down with Senator Iván Marulanda to talk about his cocaine legalization bill, which is currently moving through Colombia’s congress.

After 40 years of U.S. - backed anti-drug policy that criminalizes the coca leaf, Marulanda and a group of members of congress want to change tack. 

The bill attempts to create a legal industry that distributes cocaine to users for pain relief, not recreational use. Like that in Bolivia, it also hopes to bring hundreds of thousands of illegal coca farmers out of the shadows into a legal, homegrown industry.

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VICE World News: So what does your bill propose exactly?

Senator Iván Marulanda: It proposes that the state buy the entirety of Colombia’s coca harvest. 

There are 200,000 farmer families linked to coca growing. The state would buy coca at market prices. The programs for coca eradication each year cost four trillion pesos ($1 billion). Buying the entire coca harvest each year would cost 2.6 trillion pesos ($680 million). It costs less to buy the harvest than to destroy it. 

With that intervention from the government, two fundamental things would happen. First, you would bring 200,000 families into a legal sphere where they would no longer be persecuted by the state. Usually, these farm families end up displacing themselves, deforesting new areas, and re-planting coca while they’re running from the authorities. Second, Colombia is destroying around 300,000 hectares of forest per year. It’s estimated that coca-growing families are responsible for 25 percent of that annual deforestation. Colombia’s ecosystems are the collateral damage.