The Real Thing: Coca; Andean entrepreneurs are pushing coca beyond cola, in new teas, toothpaste, shampoo, liquor and more.

Byline: Jimmy Langman

Bolivian president Evo Morales implored the United Nations last week to give the coca leaf a new life. A former coca farmer himself, Morales asked the General Assembly to focus on coca's possible future as the raw material for a lucrative consumer-goods industry--not its nefarious present, as the source of the international cocaine trade. "This is the coca leaf, it is green, and not white like cocaine," Morales lectured, waving one limp little leaf at the hall of surprised dignitaries. Why, he demanded, is it "legal for Coca-Cola" but not other consumer or medicinal uses?

Morales is campaigning to roll back a 45-year-old U.N. ban on trade in coca products. Under pressure from the United States, which has spent billions to eradicate coca as part of its war on drugs, Morales has reluctantly destroyed more acres of coca than his predecessors. While the Bush administration says he's still not doing enough, Morales wants to double to 24,000 hectares the amount of land that Bolivia set aside long ago to grow coca for legal uses. Armed with scientific studies, Bolivian officials are attacking the perception that coca itself is harmful to health. They argue that legal products could be a viable alternative to growing the plant for use in cocaine, and far more effective than trying to wipe out the "hoja sagrada," or sacred leaf that has been a staple of Andean daily life and religious rituals since ancient times.

Meantime, in the coca-producing countries of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, dozens of businesses are developing new coca-based products, from toothpaste to wine. In Bolivia, industrial production of coca tea began in the 1980s, and since 2000, small companies have put out some 30 different products--coca bread and pastas, toothpaste and shampoo, ointments, candies, liquors. The Morales government recently set aside $1 million to further develop legal coca products. One company now has a soft drink called "Evo Cola" in the works.

In Peru, the state coca company, Enaco, has been turning out local teas for years and is now expanding. Earlier this year Enaco closed a deal to export 153,000 packets of coca tea to South Africa (which never ...