Cocaine is expected to overtake oil to become Colombia's main export as a result of far-left President Gustavo Petro's drug policies.
, coal, and oil are “more poisonous” to mankind than cocaine — an assertion he firmly reiterated during his first United Nations General Assembly speech in September 2022, when he dedicated much of his time at the podium to presenting arguments in defense of the growth and cultivation of the coca plant.
“The opinion of [those in] power has commanded that cocaine is poison and must be persecuted,” Petro said at the time, “even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and more by the mixtures created as a result of its clandestine state. But, instead, coal and oil must be protected, even if their use can extinguish all mankind.”
The solution to the drug problem will not come from “repeating little wars and wars, so bloody and ferocious and so wrong, like the wrongly called war on drugs,” Petro said this week, or “looking at drugs as a military problem and not as a health problem of society.”its 2022 report on the monitoring of Colombian territories where coca is cultivated this week. The report found that coca crops in Colombia covered 230,000 hectares in 2022, a 13-percent increase compared to 204,000 hectares in 2021.