Coca and opium (#45; Topic F)

A front-page story in today's Washington Post is on Bolivia's coca production. It seems that the future of a $100 million coca-eradication program funded by US is uncertain, now that Evo Morales, a coca-farmer elected to become Bolivia's next president, will be installed tomorrow. One of Morales's campaign issues is to decriminalize the cultivation of coca, as it has medicinal value -- and one of the ingredients in soft drinks. Indeed, I have personally benefited from coca tea. In my first trip to La Paz on World Bank business in the 1990s, I felt dizzy upon arrival. (Among capitals, La Paz has the highest elevation; hotel rooms are equipped with oxygen tanks.) The following morning, I had a breakfast meeting; when calling to cancel, my contact advised me to have a cup of coca tea and a piece of dry toast; I felt much better afterward and was myself in the early afternoon. Reading the Post story leaves me the impression that coca -- and opium before it -- is a tool of western powers. When it suits the powers one way, it is criminalized; another way, decriminalized. In the early 1800s, Britain, with nothing to offer a self-sufficient China, resorted to smuggling opium. When the Chinese government banned opium's importation, Britain declared war; winning the "Opium War" allowed Britain to gain trading rights at five ports as well as control over Hong Kong, which was returned to China only in 1997. That year, my book, The Genealogy of Chess, which documents that proto-chess was a Chinese (not Indian) invention, was completed. To celebrate two happy occasions, I began the final paragraph of my book with the following: "After 156 years, the opium warlords were finally driven out of China. .. Shall we make the year 1997 in which, after more than 300 years, the truth about the origin of chess be finally told?"
Posted at 9:01 pm, Saturday, January 21, 2006