BEVERAGE CREATES A BUZZ

Coca-Sek, Bottled by a Colombian Tribe, Gets Its Kick From Coca
Leaves. The Not-So-Soft Drink Has Stirred Debate
About Drugs and Sovereignty.

INZA, Colombia -- Call it the "Real Thing."

Indians in this remote mountain village in southern Colombia are
marketing a particularly refreshing soft drink that harks back to
Coca-Cola's original formula, when "coca" was in the name for a reason.

Advertising posters here describe the carbonated, citrus-flavored
Coca-Sek as "more than an energizer" -- a buzz that just might be
provided by a key ingredient, a syrup produced by boiling coca leaves.

Since January, the Nasa indigenous community has been offering the
soft drink locally and in neighboring Popayan, where it is bottled. By
the end of the year, the Nasa hope to sell Coca-Sek nationwide,
targeting the same consumers who drink Gatorade or Red Bull, both
highly popular with Colombians.

For six years, the Nasa have been quietly selling coca-flavored
cookies, aromatic teas, wines and ointments at informal sidewalk
stalls and in health food stores. They say they're trying to
capitalize on a plentiful resource -- and remove the stigma from a
leaf that for them is sacred.

Cocaine, the highly concentrated form of the leaf's alkaloid extracted
using solvents and other chemicals, is "foreign to our culture and is
an invention of Western man," said Gelmis Chate, president of the Nasa
council here.

But consumption of coca leaves by chewing them or by using them in
food or tea is an ancient custom. The 4,000 indigenous families in
this region typically grow several coca plants on their farms for
personal use, a right guaranteed by Colombian law.

For Abraham Cuello, 50, the half-dozen coca plants sprouting among
his banana, coffee, mango and papaya trees have as much mystic as
alimentary value. "They protect my farm and all that I grow," he said
as he pulled the bright green leaves from an 8-foot coca plant.

The Nasa's coca cookies and teas attracted little attention, but the
launch of Coca-Sek has ignited controversy in a country where
Washington has spent $4 billion since 1999 combating the drug trade
and terrorism.

The reasons are myriad: the tribe's market ambitions for the beverage;
the inevitable comparisons with the original Coke, which dropped
cocaine from its formula in 1905; and the recent election of Bolivian
President Evo Morales, an indigenous coca grower who supports the
production of legitimate coca products.

Coca-Sek has also reopened a debate over the limits of the sovereignty
that indigenous groups in Colombia and other nations are afforded. The
Nasa claim a sovereign right to commercialize the soft drink and other
coca products, even though the law permitting its use clearly limits
it to traditional, not commercial, ends.

Indigenous tribes elsewhere in the Andean region also are trying to
mainstream the leaf, trumpeting its nutritive and painkilling value.
Morales, who says he will end coca eradication efforts in Bolivia,
promotes coca-based yogurt, soap, bread and tea. He is appealing to
the United Nations to drop the coca plant's designation as a poisonous
substance, which would open the way to exports.

In Peru, a state-owned monopoly called Enaco was formed to create a
legitimate market for coca leaves and channel them into the production
of toothpaste, topical ointments to treat arthritis, tea and energizer
drinks such as Coca-Sek. Nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala, who led
Peru's presidential vote Sunday, promised to push for legalization of
coca if elected.

In Colombia, the drive to make legitimate products from the coca leaf
is being led by the Calderas reservation, one of half a dozen Nasa
communities clustered around Inza. The community pays $15 for each
30-pound bag of coca leaves. Each bag makes enough syrup to produce
300 bottles of Coca-Sek.

That price tops the $12 a bag paid by local drug traffickers, who are
always willing to buy leaves, said David Curtidor, who helps manage
the soft drink business and touts the beverage as a weapon in the war
on drugs. "Each leaf that goes to making the drink is one leaf less
for the narcos," Curtidor said.

Chewing coca leaves, which depresses the central nervous system, has
enabled Indians to soften the effects of hunger, hard work and high
altitude for centuries. Franky Rios, the engineer at Popayan's La
Reina bottling plant who oversees the production of the beverage, said
Coca-Sek delivers the various vitamins and minerals, including
calcium, potassium and magnesium, found in the coca leaf.

"It's better than Gatorade," he said.

Jim Bauml, senior biologist at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, said
coca leaf boosters might be on to something. "There is literature out
there that shows there is a tremendous nutritive value in the leaf
itself," he said. "How much of that is released by chewing or other
extraction methods isn't clear, but it's there potentially."

A bonus is the spiritual power that the Nasa people believe resides in
coca. In this valley that is also the site of the Tierradentro
prehistoric burial caves, one of Colombia's most important
archeological zones, evidence of that belief is seen in many of the
stone statues unearthed in recent years. Several of the carved human
forms are holding cuetanderas, the woven bags that the Nasa even today
use to carry their coca leaves for chewing.

"Coca permits man to communicate with nature, and nature with man,"
said Fabiola Pinacue, a Nasa who helps run the coca-based businesses
and is a former mayor of Paez, a village 15 miles north of Inza.

But the Nasa and other indigenous communities are up against hardened
attitudes. Even European Union and Japanese charitable groups that
have funded other economic initiatives in Inza, including the online
sales of locally grown organic coffee, want no part of underwriting
Coca-Sek or any other coca-based product, said Chate, the Nasa council
president.

Maybe it's because coca is such a freighted term -- and the target of
the Plan Colombia crop eradication program that is funded by the
United States and supported by the United Nations. (Indigenous
reservations are exempt from spraying.)

Although the coca-based energizer drink and the aromatic teas contain
relatively small amounts of the cocaine alkaloid, ingesting great
amounts could produce the same effect as that from the refined powder,
said Greg Thompson, an associate professor of clinical pharmacy at
USC.

"There are cases of people dipping 80 coca teabags into a teapot and
getting classic cocaine toxicity from drinking it," Thompson said.

The Nasa say that normal use of their products is perfectly safe. "The
world's mind is closed to the good uses of the leaf," Chate said.
"We're trying to show that we can make value-added products that
aren't a danger to anyone."

But the Nasa may be on a collision course with the Colombian
government, which has yet to sanction Coca-Sek. A top official with
the Colombian equivalent of the Drug Enforcement Administration said
the government's concern was that coca leaves ostensibly destined for
the soft drink operation would somehow be diverted to drug
traffickers.

"The law perfectly recognizes that coca is important to their
religious ceremonies," said the official, who asked not to be
identified, citing the political sensitivity of the issue. "But it
doesn't talk about commercial ends, and that's a confusion that needs
to be clarified."

The government threatened to shut down the Popayan bottling plant in
February and confiscate all the bottles. The Nasa asked the national
council of indigenous tribes, which represents 1.2 million people, to
issue a permit, insisting that was all the permission they needed.

This being an election year, the government quickly backed
off.

Jorge Ronderos, a sociology professor at Caldas University in the
Colombian city of Manizales and an expert on coca's place in
indigenous culture, thinks Western governments have needlessly
demonized the coca leaf.

"All that is lacking is a declaration that it is a terrorist plant,"
Ronderos said.

An official with the state Health Department where the Popayan
bottling plant is located said the government's only interest was
ensuring that the soft drink was safe. He said the beverage had not
undergone the proper testing and was not properly labeled.

"If people get sick, they are going to come after me," the official
said.

The Nasa are producing about 8,000 bottles of Coca-Sek a week, up from
3,000 initially. They think they can easily market double that number
if they can penetrate Colombia's urban markets.

Meanwhile, sales are brisk. The beverage isn't yet turning a profit --
production is financed with proceeds from the coca-flavored aromatic
teas, which have been sold since 1999. Coca-Sek's survival as a
product may hinge on finding a larger bottling plant closer to big
cities such as Bogota or Medellin.

None of Colombia's big bottlers is lining up so far to produce
Coca-Sek, but Curtidor believes it's not because of any stigma
attached to coca leaves.

"They don't want the competition," he said.