This week Bolivia's Ambassador to the United Nations signaled his country's withdrawal from the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Bolivia's president Evo Morales instructed the withdrawal after months of lobbying at the UN in pursuit of an exclusion to the Convention for the criminalization of coca-leaf chewing, which is seen as an ancestral right by the Andean country's indigenous peoples. Earlier in the year at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs annual meeting in Vienna, the United States refused to permit Bolivia's reclassification of the coca leaf. Other countries, such as Mexico, supported the US position, arguing that renegotiating one part of the treaty for coca leaf would put the whole system of international prohibition in jeopardy.