And if Coca Leaves Had Come Across First?

A European man smokes a
tobacco pipe around 1595.
(Drawing by Anthony Chute,
via Wikipedia)

During his voyages of discovery to the Americas, Christopher Columbus's men discovered a novel plant, whose leaves produced a pleasant effect when placed in a pipe and smoked. Soon after, some "were unable to cease using it," reported Spanish Bishop Las Casas. And only a few decades later, tobacco was developing a booming market across Europe.

Chocolate's story is similar: Discovered by the Europeans about 1520, by the early 1600s chocolate drinks sweetened with sugar were becoming popular across Europe.

Workers in the Dutch colony of Java stamp
coca leaves in the early 1900s.
(Image: Wikipedia)

However, a third New World plant with addictive properties caught on more slowly. Carried to Europe in the 1500s, coca and its derivatives didn't become popular in the Old World and United States until the 1800s, when products such as coca wine and cocaine-containing medicines were marketed.

Chocolate drinking, portrayed
by by Philippe Sylvestre
Dufour, 1685.
(Image from Wikipedia)

Today, of course, chocolate and tobacco are both deeply embedded in Western culture, despite the tobacco leaf's severe health effects. Many governments are campaigning against tobacco use, with irregular results. But because of the leaf's addictiveness, cultural role and huge economic power, none will ever completely eliminate it.

All of which makes me wonder: What if cocaine had been exported and popularized first? Was it only a matter of geographic chance that chocolate and tobacco became Western cultural icons, while coca and cocaine become demonized? After all, even coca leaves, which produce no more than a mild narcotic effect when chewed, are on the United Nations' list of banned substances, right along with heroin.

Sure, cocaine's effects on human behavior can be much more intense than that of nicotine and caffeine, the active ingredients in tobacco and chocolate, respectively. However, "research suggests that nicotine is as addictive as heroin, cocaine, or alcohol," according to the United States Centers for Disease Control. And, it'd be easy to argue that tobacco can do you more harm than cocaine can.

Perhaps if columbus had carried coca leaves home in 1505, but tobacco leaves hadn't made it across the ocean until the 1600s, today we'd be sipping coca wine with supper, while tobacco cigarettes would be back-alley contraband. Perhaps.

Coca wine, from DrugLibrary.org

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

With Coca Leaf, All That Goes Down Must Go Up

'Historic fall in coca leaf cultivation,' says today's El Tiempo

El Tiempo reports that Colombia's coca leaf crop has dropped to 48 hectares, a 25% drop from 2011 and a level not seen since the 1990s, when the Peruvian and Bolivian crops began shifting north.

The result, which is still preliminary and comes from a yet-unreleased United Nations report, will surely be crowed over by supporters of the War on Drugs. It shows, they'll say, that aggressive eradication does work. In this case, according to El Tiempo, the key was preventing farmers from replanting, in part by offering them economic alternatives.

Manually eradicating coca bushes near the Ecuadorian border.
(Photo: AFP/Colombia Reports)

That's well enough. But El Tiempo's story also points out that the coca leaf crops have expanded in both Bolivia and Peru, the second of which has surpassed Colombia in leaf production.

Sure, perhaps if Colombia's effective anti-coca leaf policies were applied everywhere the drug war could be won. But that ideal world won't arrive anytime soon. And, even if they did apply such effective measures across the Andean region - or even all of South America - the crop would likely just shift to Asia or Africa.

I've been waiting for an excuse to post this graph, which I found in a Washington Post piece entitled 'The most embarrassing graph in American drug policy.'

Since 1970, cocaine prices in the US have dropped, even while incarceration rates have soared.
(Graph from Carnegie Mellon University)

If the drug war was supposed to accomplish anything, it was to raise cocaine's price, discouraging use. Instead, cocaine prices have dropped over the last two decades. (The blue line and the black one with white dots. The red and black lines show the rise in inprisonment.)

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Coca Leaves Finally Get a Little Respect

Coca leaves and other products for sale on a Bogotá plaza. The salesman said these were imported from Peru.

Altho technically banned, Colombia's indigenous peoples
 cultivate and market coca leaf products.

For thousands of years, coca leaves have been chewed by Andean indigenous peoples, who also attribute to them religious significance. But then Europeans took coca leaves home and figured out how to extract a drug, which millions of people, particularly north Americans, proceeded to get themselves addicted to.

In 1961, to protect addicts in rich countries, the United Nations prohibited cultivating and chewing the leaves.

The prohibition seems wildly unfair. After all, even during U.S. alcohol Prohibition, grapes were still legal (and were marketed with instructions about how to turn them into an inebriating liquid). Coca leaves contain such a tiny amount of the cocaine alkaloid that they give users just a slight pick-me-up.

Vendors claim that coca products
cure all manner of ailments.

In 2009, to protest the U.N. prohibition, Bolivian Pres. Evo Morales, a one-time coca farmer who still heads a coca farmers organization, withdrew his country from the United Nations Convention on illegal drugs. The prohibition, he said, equated traditional coca leaf farmers with "narcotraffickers and drug users."

The other day, the U.N. readmitted Bolivia - with a special clause permitting coca leaf chewing. Incredibly, 15 countries objected to the exception for coca leaf chewing. And leading the opposition was, of course, the United States.

It's a tiny crack in the drug prohibitionism, and it begins to repair a huge historical double standard. After all, the same 1961 treaty which prohibited indigenous peoples' ancient traditions also included a specific exception for the Coca Cola Company, which adds a cocaine-free coca leaf extract to its soft drink.

But the exception doesn't include the other Andean nations, including Colombia, where indigenous people chew coca leaves and many people buy teas, cookies, ointments and drinks made from the leaves. And, there's of course no mention of the many millions of people all over the world who would surely like to try such coca leaf products, whose makers claim they provide all sorts of health benefits.

So, for the foreseeable future, these leaves, which could provide another export for Colombia and help relieve the country's beleaguered farmers, will remain technically prohibited.

Related Blogposts:

Taking a Courageous Stand Against...Leaves

Good Riddance to 'La Mata que Mata!'
By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours