Part of the  Graduate Student Association Fall 2016 Speaker Series

Each year, the Department of Geography and Urban Studies holds the Benjamin H. Kohl Social Justice Lecture in  honor of our colleague and friend, Professor Ben Kohl, whose commitment to social justice permeated all aspects of his life from the academy to liberation struggles in Bolivia.

Linda Farthing has written extensively on drug policy, particularly on coca leaf. She is co-author of Habeas Coca: Bolivia's Community Control of Coca (2015), a research project of the Andean Information Network and editor of "Re-imagining Drug Policy in the Americas" for NACLA. She field produced the film Cocaine Unwrapped.(in Bolivia) and has written a drug policy curriculum for high school students. She is the co-author of Impasse in Bolibia, from the Mines to the Streets: a Bilivian Activist's life and Evo's Bolivia: Continuity and Change with the late Dr. Benjamin Kohl, who was a Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple.

Her talk discusses briefly the history, politics, an dsocial context of coca leaf in Bolivia. In 2004, Bolivia broke definitively with twenty years of the US-financed the War on Drugs when it adopted the CATO Accord, which permits farmers to grow a subsistance amount of coca. Since 2009, under Evo Morales, this policy is known as community control of coca. The talk explores the successes and challenges facing this novel approach to drug crop control.

Reception to follow.