Coca leaves, which are used as the raw material for the production of cocaine, are sacred to many indigenous Andes-dwelling people.

In 2008, when the United Nation’s International Narcotics Control Board suggested to the nations of Peru and Bolivia that they abolish or prohibit activities like coca leaf-chewing as well as the manufacture of coca tea, Peruvian Congresswoman Maria Sumire voiced her dissent.

 "The United Nations lacks respect for the indigenous people ... who have used the coca leaf since forever...For indigenous people, coca is a sacred leaf that is part of their cultural identity," she said, according to Natural News. 

To the Kogi, an indigenous group that lives in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, the coca leaf itself represents spiritual properties and is used in a special coming of age ceremony for young males.

To Arregocés Coronado, a member of the Kogi, the idea of mass producing the sacred leaf and and then selling it is a kind of blasphemous offence to the “ancestral mother.”

The Miami Herald reports the Kogi and the Colombian government are now coming together to put a halt to the mass production of coca leaves.

So far around 1,600 Kogi families have been turning fields that were previously used to grow coca into coffee farms. And this is good news for Colombia now that the country is actively searching for new ways to stop the production of coca leaves since they have stopped dusting coca fields with glyphosate, a carcinogenic weed killer.

Yury Fedotov, the global head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, recently visited a processing plant where the Kogi roast and package their coffee beans and ready them for export. Addressing the need to find new ways to stop coca production, he said: “Alternative development is very important.” And having the indigenous peoples switch over to making coffee, Fedotov asserts, “may be the only possibility to eradicate illicit coca cultivation.”