The Coca Leaf: Misunderstood, Shortchanged, Feared

It’s the Edward Scissorhands of botanicals.

I mentioned, in a prior post about my journey to Machu Picchu, a freakishly large Idahoan ginger I met by happenstance in a Puno farmacia after retardedly flying from near-zero elevation in Lima to 12,500+ in Puno with no allowances planned to cope with the altitude shift.

He recommended a local remedy for acute mountain sickness I had been obliquely aware of but had never taken seriously: the coca leaf.

As a captive receptable for government propaganda in public school in the 90s, I learned a lot about the evils of cocaine yet nothing of the coca plant itself, which for Kafkaesque reasons remains federally illegal in the United States — nor coca’s storied history as folk medicine in South America.

(Once, circa 1995 or so — when probably a solid fifth of my class was wired on Ritalin, which is not considered an illicit drug for some reason — as part of the D.A.R.E. routine, our teachers made us sign pledges on postcards promising God or the state or whomever never to do drugs. We were then directed to encase them in red balloons that we released in a ceremony in the parking lot with the school address on them so when people in surrounding counties and states found the litter in their backyard they would mail it back to the school reporting where it had landed, the coordinates of which the secretary then marked on a giant map as some sort of mark of pride, the relevance of which to not taking drugs having never been explained.)

Via Indian Journal of Clinical Biochemistry (emphasis added):

“Andean Indians have used coca leaves for centuries to enhance physical performance. The modern methods of obtaining cocaine were not known to the Andean culture…

The purpose of this pilot study was to determine if there were any subtle biochemical changes, which were influenced by chewing the coca leaves. Standard methods of assessing a person’s response to continued exercise such as blood pressure, pulse rate, VO2 max and ECG changes did not show any significant changes between the two groups.

The experimental findings suggested that chewing coca leaves induces biochemical changes that enhance physical performance at high altitude. These changes appeared sustained and were detectable at the later stages of the experiment.”

Is the coca leaf the equivalent of cocaine, which is apparently the DEA’s position as both are equally federally illegal?

Is a caterpillar a butterfly?

The chemical metamorphosis that coca leaves undergo to become cocaine renders it an entirely different thing.

Cocaine is the highly processed and concentrated extract of the cocaine alkaloid, usually mixed with a toxic cocktail of chemicals and stepped on by avaricious drug dealers to maximize profits; coca leaf is an unprocessed plant product with a cornucopia of alkaloids, vitamins, minerals, and other beneficial compounds. 

Via Transnational Institute (emphasis added):

“While the coca leaf in its natural form is a harmless and mild stimulant comparable to coffee, there is no doubt that cocaine can be extracted from the coca leaf. Without coca there would be no cocaine. The 'ready extractability' of cocaine from coca leaves is currently the major argument to justify the current illegal status of the leaf in the 1961 Single Convention. The cocaine alkaloid content in coca leaf ranges between 0,5 and 1,0 percent.”

The two main takeaways here — which I already absorbed deep into my bones in other contexts but which are only further reinforced — are:

·       Public school is a government indoctrination camp disguised as an educational enterprise

·       Fuck the U.S. government, but most especially the DEA and the Department of Education

Related: A Brave New Maxim For a Brave New World

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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