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LA PAZ, Bolivia - The smell filling the grimy whitewashed rooms of the market in the Villa Fatima district overlooking this Andean capital evokes the sweetness of cut grass - only it's more pungent, nearly intoxicating.
Sacks of freshly harvested coca leaves are stacked all around, awaiting buyers. It's all legal, this trade in the leaves that produce cocaine.
There's lots more coca leaf around than there has been in years, no surprise given that new President Evo Morales was recently re-elected head of Bolivia's coca growers' federation.
Eradication of Bolivian coca leaf, an enterprise underwritten almost exclusively with U.S. tax dollars, is down more than 60 percent since Morales took office.
The destruction of coca fields is no longer forced, but depends on the cooperation of coca growers, said Felipe Caceres, the official in charge of the effort and himself a coca grower.
Morales has declared zero tolerance for cocaine but says he won't discourage coca growing for traditional consumption.
To see one such traditional use, look no further than the bulging cheek of Daniel Sonco, a 37-year-old coca trader.
He chews on a ball of coca leaves as he and a colleague repack a half-dozen 50-pound sacks of ''hoja de coca'' in airtight plastic for a trip down from Bolivia's high plains to the steamy eastern lowlands, where he says he sells them in 1-pound lots to agricultural workers.
''If you don't chew down there, you get sleepy,'' says Sonco, his breath emitting a bitter, alkaloid odor. ''The people in the east need to chew to work because it's so hot there.''
There is a traditional mystique to coca-leaf chewing. It was once a restricted privilege of Inca royalty before becoming common practice among indigenous peoples in the Andes, where the stimulant doesn't just suppress the appetite but also helps ward off altitude sickness.