Due to President Clinton's 1994 DSHEA law (Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994), and diverting science funding to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a large number of people believe acupuncture works and that supplements can be alternatives to medicine.

Acupuncture is the placebo effect but some natural products can work - the problem is that if they work they may do something bad. Kratom is an example of a product banned in countries that grow it; unless it is for export to the United States. They know that it works, and also that it can kill Godzilla.

That it can help or harm is why coca leaves are listed among Schedule I substances under the UN 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, along with products like cocaine and fentanyl and many others.



A group would like to change that, arguing it was sacred among ancient people of the Andes and the World Health Organisation should take action to separate it from its purified alkaloid, cocaine. They argue that coca has been grown for thousands of years and used in rituals among 100 cultures in that time, as a stimulant, medicine, and psychoactive. Their pronunciamiento asks the UN to reject its stigmatization based on cocaine use and to recommend its removal from international control lists.

“The coca leaf is not a narcotic, but a sacred and nutritious plant with deep cultural roots,” said Ricardo Soberón Garrido, former President of DEVIDA, Peru’s National Commission for Development and Life Without Drugs, which coordinates the country’s drug policy and coca-development strategies. “De-scheduling coca would uphold Indigenous rights and align global policy with modern science.”

The scientific rebuttal to that is coca leaves did not grow to 500,000 acres cultivated by cocaleros in Colombia alone, mostly paid for by criminal gangs at war with the government for decades, because of harmless religious use. They're grown and sold to make cocaine.

The WHO’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence meets next to formalize a recommendation to the United Nations (UN) Commission on Narcotic Drugs and it is just a formality. The modern UN is going to allow whatever tribal groups consider ancient rituals and invoke colonial bias about. That ancient rituals meant natives using the plant for child sacrifices won't be entered into evidence.