Coca-Cola Vs Coca Sek In Colombia

Taken from ABC News, May 10, 2007
By SERGIO DE LEON, Associated Press

President Alvaro Uribe is taking the war on drugs to the supermarket, prohibiting the sale of products made from the coca plant.

With the help of more than $600 million a year in U.S. aid, Uribe has strengthened Colombia's anti-narcotics police, seized record tons of cocaine and extradited 520 drug trafficking suspects to U.S. jails.

But until recently, his hardline government had not gone after natural coca products made by Indians, acknowledging that millions of peasants have chewed calcium-rich coca for thousands of years to stave off hunger and as a remedy for ailments from altitude sickness to stomach aches.

Uribe's presidential Web site even promoted natural coca products as a rare commercial enterprise for poor Indian communities, and the federal food-safety agency provided quality-control advice to the manufacturers of coca tea, cookies, shampoo and other consumer goods.

That suddenly changed in February, when Uribe's administration started banning the sale of coca products outside the reservations where Indians have a constitutional right to grow the hearty plant. Though it's still possible to find coca products at boutique markets and health food stores, inspectors have begun to forcibly remove them from supermarket shelves.

What prompted the switch?

For one, the success of Coca Sek, an energy drink made by the Nasa Indian tribe.

The carbonated drink made with coca, which looks like apple cider and tastes vaguely like ginger ale, was becoming a trendy alternative to Coca-Cola among Colombia's urban youth. The logo on the can even mimicked the popular U.S. soft drink's curvy script.

Newspapers around the world ran David-and-Goliath stories about the challenge by an unknown Indian tribe to the U.S. soda behemoth.

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. responded with a trademark-infringement suit that Colombian authorities quickly dismissed.

Word also reached Austria, where the International Narcotics Control Board enforces a 1961 treaty that requires the "uprooting of all coca bushes which grow wild" and bans the distribution of products with even trace amounts of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine.

The board sent Colombia's foreign minister a letter asking how the "refreshing drink made from coca and produced by an Indian community" didn't violate the treaty and months later, the food safety agency quietly imposed the ban.

The Nasas cried foul, suspecting behind-the-scenes pressure from Coca-Cola.

Colombia's food safety agency, the narcotics control board and Coca-Cola Co. all denied that.

Agency lawyer Carolina Contreras says it was the control board's letter that prompted the ban, and the control board says it had no communication from Coca-Cola before sending it.

But the Indians remain suspicious. While they've appealed the ban, their $15,000-a-month income from the sale of Coca Sek and other coca products is suffering, says David Curtidor, a Nasa in charge of the company that produces the drink.

"Why don't they also ban Coca-Cola?" he said, claiming: "It's also made of coca leaves."

Dana Bolden, a spokesman at Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters, would neither confirm nor deny that a coca extract is part of the secret recipe. He repeated the company's longstanding refusal to reveal any elements of the Coca-Cola formula.

A loophole in the 1961 treaty allows coca leaves to be sold internationally if they are later distilled of their cocaine alkaloid to produce a "flavoring agent." That's what Northfield, Ill.-based Stepan Co. does under a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration license.

The Stepan Co., according to its Web site, is a "a global manufacturer of specialty and intermediate chemicals used in consumer products and industrial application." The company didn't respond to repeated requests to confirm that Coca-Cola is a client.

Stepan is the only U.S. firm currently importing coca, a DEA spokeswoman told The Associated Press. It buys about 55 tons of Peruvian coca leaves each year, said Jimmy Salcedo, commercial manager for Peru's state-owned National Coca Company, Enaco.

Many Indians in the Andes where coca is revered as a sacred plant and a matter of national pride in several countries are angry that the United States is importing coca leaves legally while their own coca products are banned.

"The coca leaf is legal for Coca-Cola and illegal for medicinal purposes in our country and in the whole world," Bolivian President Evo Morales told the U.N. General Assembly last year.