Just say yes: cheap cocaine is flooding U.S. streets. Time to let the Bolivians figure a way out for us.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that a new U.S. drug strategy is long overdue in the South American Andes. What will take some special insight, however, is accepting that Bolivian President Evo Morales has the answer.

Last year, Morales shifted the fight away from poor coca farmers to drug traffickers and their crude coca leaf processing pits, laboratories and chemicals. Morales is well aware that Bolivia's poorest often have no alternative income than to grow the raw material for making cocaine.

A former coca grower himself, Morales also envisions promoting the high-calcium, vitamin-rich coca leaf in legal products, including tea, toothpaste, soap, gum, flour, soft drinks, cooking oil, cosmetics, wine, lozenges--even cookies. He has asked the European Union to gauge the size of the legal coca market, and Cuba to study the leaf's pharmaceutical value. Venezuela President Hugo Chavez has financed two factories that will produce coca tea and coca baking flour for the Venezuelan market.

Thousands make their living from coca farming in Bolivia, making this move a necessity. "The Morales government understands what the U.S. government misses: Coca growing is about feeding people's families," says Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, a nonprofit group that monitors drug operations in Bolivia. "The U.S. needs to move away from old and ineffective yardsticks that measure drug control."

Unfortunately, the U.S. government disagrees, arguing the new policy threatens to undermine its war on drugs. "There's only one good use (for coca) ... in economic terms, and that's cocaine," U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Philip Goldberg told the Associate Press recently. "The narco-traffickers will always pay more than the toothpaste factory."

Yet violence associated with U.S.-financed eradication programs has ebbed dramatically under the Morales plan. Since 1998, 33 coca growers and 27 security officers have been killed, mostly in the major illegal growing area called Chapare. Last year, two growers were killed in a confrontation with soldiers in another area.

Although it will take time to see if the "Coca Yes, Cocaine No" program has a profound effect on the drug trade, the strategy has a much better chance of providing long-term results.

It has been 20 years since U.S. President Ronald Reagan launched the struggle to stop Andean farmers from growing coca leaf. Billions of dollars later, cocaine is not only readily available in U.S. cities but is selling at all-time-low prices. It's clear that U.S. programs that send soldiers to pull out coca plants, pilots to spray herbicides and agricultural experts to introduce alternative crops have done little to stem the flow of cocaine into the United States.

Now, many Chapare growers are limiting their fields to the government policy of one cato (1,600 square meters), a level that ensures a steady income, while soldiers are supplying them with vaccines, vitamins and medical assistance. Most important, anti-drug forces seized 12 tons of cocaine in 2006 in contrast to just three tons in 2005; 26% more cocaine base and cocaine hydrochloride than during the first nine months of 2005, and eradicated 5,000 hectares of illegal coca fields.

Nevertheless, the new strategy will fail unless the United Nations overturns a 1961 ban by the U.N. Convention on Narcotics that bars the manufacture of all coca-derived products. The restrictions are so strict that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reportedly left behind a Chilean-made mandolin, a gift from Morales called a charango, because it was decorated with lacquered coca, to avoid breaking the law. How silly is that?

In his travels as head of state, Morales solicits support for overturning this absurd law, pointing out that an internationally famous U.S. corporation remains exempt. "How is it possible that the coca leaf is legal for Coca-Cola but illegal for other medicinal purposes in our country and the rest of the world?" he asked the U.N. General Assembly last year. (Coca-Cola has long used the non-drug alkaloid as a flavoring agent. Morales recently pushed the Atlanta soft-drink giant to remove the world "coca" from its name.)

I do not promote and would not encourage consumption of cocaine, an addictive drug that has ruined innumerable lives. But the U.S. coca strategy has been an abject failure. And even though the Morales plan is controversial, it has popular support and makes sense. There is little doubt that many Andean coca growers would jump at the chance to lead a life free of drug mafias and police raids.

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