In April, Colombia’s first legal coca-processing laboratory shut its doors. Built in the mountains of the department of Cauca by Nasa Indigenous communities with support from a Canadian start-up, the facility has produced more than 400 tons of organic fertilizer from coca leaves. Named Nasa Wala, the project aimed to offer farmers a legal alternative to the drug economy that has dominated the war-torn region for decades. “This was our opportunity to turn blood into life,” says Victoriano Piñacué, a Nasa leader who spearheaded the initiative. Instead, the laboratory now stands idle on the banks of the Páez River, a closed building surrounded by the same coca fields that feed the global cocaine trade.
The laboratory is located in the Cohetando Indigenous reserve. On the surface, life seems peaceful: small farms, lush mountains, and the roaring Páez River. But behind the calm lies the constant presence of the Dagoberto Ramos Front, a dissident faction of the former FARC guerrilla group. It is one of several armed groups competing for drug revenues in Cauca, a department that contains around 8.5 percent of the world’s coca crop. Residents speak of informal curfews, night checkpoints, and a system of lookouts who monitor every vehicle on the narrow road that leads to the lab. Here, the guerrilleros act as both judges and executioners.
But none of that seems apparent when Piñacué opens the door to Nasa Wala’s modern laboratory: test tubes, flasks, and machines ready for production. Today, there is no electricity, but everything is clean and tidy. It is as if the 30 workers who used to work at the plant were about to start their shift at any moment.
The idea for the project was born during the pandemic, when three neighboring Nasa reserves joined forces with Canadian company Power Leaves to build and supply the lab. Instead of selling leaves for cocaine production, they would turn coca into fertilizer, flavorings, even soft drinks. But there was a catch: under international law, the coca leaf is classified as a narcotic, leaving any derivative product in legal limbo. To move forward, Piñacué would have to convince the Colombian government to open the door to regulation.
From Promise to Paralysis
In 1961, the international community signed the United Nations’ Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in New York. The treaty classified the coca bush in the same category as cocaine and heroin, ordered the eradication of coca crop, and even banned coca chewing—a long-standing Indigenous tradition.
“The review carried out to justify this was racist and contrary to human rights. It sought to eliminate a species that is part of the world’s botanical wealth and tied to the cultural heritage of Andean and Amazonian peoples,” says Andrés López, a consultant and former director of Colombia’s National Narcotics Fund.
That framework locked Colombia into a prohibitionist model for decades: forced eradication, aerial fumigation, and the criminalization of the entire production chain. Impoverished farmers who grew coca as their only means of survival were caught in the crossfire. “The coca leaf itself is not narcotic,” Piñacué argues. “Cocaine is produced only when it’s combined with other components like ether, caustic soda, sodium permanganate, and gasoline. Should we also ban those products? Why is it our fault that some German scientists created cocaine?”
After decades of persecution, the window Piñacué had been waiting for seemed to open in 2022, when Gustavo Petro took office as Colombia’s first leftist president.
After decades of persecution, the window Piñacué had been waiting for seemed to open in 2022, when Gustavo Petro took office as Colombia’s first leftist president. Petro came to power vowing to end the country’s failed war on drugs—a theme he has carried to global stages from the UN to regional summits—and his development plan included, for the first time, the possibility of regulating non-psychoactive uses of coca. The Cohetando lab quickly became a showcase for this new vision. Vice President Francia Márquez visited the site and praised it: “This sacred and blessed plant must once again be a source of life, not of death,” she told the community.
Interest spread quickly. “It felt good to use coca for the development of our people, not for harm. We were all very excited,” says Jaime Quiguanás, an Indigenous farmer from the Calderas reserve who sold leaves to Nasa Wala. By December 2023, Colombia’s Agricultural Institute (ICA) granted the project the country’s first registration for an organic fertilizer made with coca.
With both political and technical approval in place, the community believed the final green light was imminent. Since Indigenous peoples in Colombia are already allowed to cultivate coca and make traditional products, the Nasa Wala only needed a decree authorizing commercialization nationwide. Two drafts circulated, raising hopes across coca-growing regions. But the final signature never came. In April 2025, Piñacué announced the lab’s closure. Most of those who had sold their leaves to the project returned to selling to traffickers.
The International Prohibition Regime Looms Large
There was no single reason why the government’s decree stalled. People interviewed for this article that are familiar with the internal discussions reported that part of the resistance came from within Indigenous movements themselves, who feared handing over control of the coca leaf to foreign multinationals. Others pointed to the constant cabinet changes in Petro’s government.
But a larger obstacle may have come from beyond Colombia’s borders. “Regulating coca means opening up the possibility of increased cultivation. How will the rest of the world react when the country that produces the most cocaine expands its coca fields—even for legal purposes? Not everyone will stomach that,” argues López.
That fear sharpened with the return of Donald Trump to the presidency. Early in Petro’s term, when Joe Biden was still in office, Colombian officials floated the idea of pushing through the coca decree with little risk. But Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 changed the calculus. Trump has positioned himself as one of Petro’s fiercest critics and long threatened to “decertify” Colombia—a U.S. sanction mechanism that can suspend aid and financial benefits for countries deemed to be “failing” the war on drugs.
He did just that on September 15, 2025, when Washington announced Colombia’s decertification for the first time in nearly three decades. Though politically stinging, the designation came with a waiver allowing U.S. aid—an estimated $400 million last year—to continue. For now, the move remains largely symbolic, but it arms Trump with another lever of pressure over Petro for the remainder of his term.
“Regulating coca now, with the Trump administration, would be crazy,” says Ana María Rueda, a drug policy researcher at the Fundación Ideas para la Paz. “Still, Petro could have done it during his first two years in office.
“Regulating coca now, with the Trump administration, would be crazy,” says Ana María Rueda, a drug policy researcher at the Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP). “Still, Petro could have done it during his first two years in office. Many coca-based projects sprawled, encouraged by the president’s discourse. But he abandoned them,” she adds.
Colombia’s Ministry of Justice did not respond in time for this publication. One possible explanation, on top of U.S. pressure and the recent decertification, is the political culture shaped by the UN treaties. Experts say the conventions have fostered an almost reflexive assumption in Colombia that anything related to coca is forbidden—even though, on paper, they leave more room for maneuver than many officials acknowledge.
“All narcotics have licit industrial uses,” López notes. “Cannabis has hemp for fabrics and materials. Opium yields morphine. And coca, too, has industrial uses.” López pointed to Article 27 of the Single Convention—known as the “Coca-Cola article,”—which permits coca’s use as a flavoring agent. These precedents suggest that products like Ancestral fertilizer could fit within existing rules.
The rapid global legalization of cannabis has also shown how far countries can push boundaries. “Uruguay and several U.S. states legalized marijuana, defying the conventions without consequence,” Rueda points out. “If you justify your reasons, the International Narcotics Control Board usually lets it pass.”
As these legal and geopolitical arguments piled up, Piñacué refused to give up. Meeting after meeting, he sat with high officials in Bogotá, pushing for the decree. “They patted me on the back and told me the signature was coming,” he recalls. He claims the government even agreed to buy the fertilizer for a nationwide subsidy program, commissioning Nasa Wala to produce 400 tons.
For Piñacué, the failure felt like betrayal. “We were left with the fertilizer because of the incompetence and the instability of Gustavo Petro and all his ministers,” he says. What was once celebrated as a model for peace and development became, in his view, another broken promise. “Without firing a single shot, we were ready to transform the life and economy of farmers in southwest Colombia. We are disappointed—and I fear the right will return, bringing only glyphosate and bullets.”
Coca’s Future in the UN’s Hands
While Colombia’s decree stalled at home, two parallel processes at the UN may shape coca’s future. The first is a request led by Bolivia and backed by Colombia asking the World Health Organization (WHO) to reassess—for the first time—coca’s classification as a narcotic. The official outcome is expected in December 2025.
The second initiative was spearheaded by Colombia in the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna. In March, Bogotá built a coalition of 30 countries that called for—and gained approval of—an independent panel to evaluate the whole global drug control regime.
“This is the first time such a review has been approved, and the potential is enormous,” said Laura Gil, Colombia’s former ambassador to Austria. The expert panel could recommend expanding research into industrial uses of the coca leaf, which Gil argued would help “take it out of the hands of drug traffickers”.
The report will not be ready until 2027. In the meantime, experts argue that Colombia must move forward with regulating coca at home. Doing so could help the state regain legitimacy in territories where forced eradication and fumigation turned coca into a war between the government and farmers. It would, at the same time, honor a “historical debt” to Indigenous peoples, whose sacred plant was condemned as one of the world’s worst drugs.
The economic stakes are also significant. Roughly 200,000 families in Colombia depend on coca cultivation for their livelihood, yet most live in poverty and are exposed to dangerous working conditions. Regulation could create alternative industries—from fertilizers and teas to flours and soft drinks—that could begin to shift one of Colombia’s largest informal economies toward legality.
While coca’s fate is once again being debated in distant UN halls, in Cauca, Victoriano Piñacué pulls leaves from a lone coca bush by the gate of his shuttered lab. He remembers the excitement of farmers from conflict-scarred regions who wanted to sell their harvests to Nasa Wala instead of traffickers, and the sadness of letting go of workers one by one as the project collapsed. Yet he refuses to give up. “They will never destroy the coca leaf. Governments may come and go, but coca will endure because it is sacred.”
Eduardo Echeverri López is a freelance journalist based in Colombia covering politics, the environment, and conflict. He has reported from Egypt, Spain, and Palestine.