For decades, coca has been treated as contraband, the raw material for cocaine. The police rip out plants across the Andes, and Washington has poured billions into eradication campaigns.

And yet here in Bolivia, where growing, selling and consuming coca is legal, a government communications officer steadied a tripod in the tiny Andean town of San José de Pery one afternoon, filming a farmer as he prepared the soil for coca.

“I’m going to explain how to use this tool called a wallhua,” said the farmer, Jaime Mamani, 64, lifting a three-pronged rake. “There — you’ve just planted the seedling.”

To many, coca exists solely as the basis of cocaine, a plant harvested, mixed with chemicals, altered in covert labs and trafficked across the globe. But in its natural form it is something else entirely: a mild stimulant chewed, brewed and revered in Andean communities for millennia.

In fact, coca is such an integral part of the small, landlocked South American nation of Bolivia that its government is leading a campaign to press the United Nations to remove the leaf from the world’s list of most dangerous drugs.