All you ever needed to know about Coca

You can't avoid the coca leaf in Bolivia. Women sell it out of huge garbage bags in all of the markets, every cafe serves coca tea and it's often touted as the best treatment for altitude sickness. And then there's the coca museum, displaying an overwhelming amount of info on the leaf, the refined product, and all of the implications that both have had for Bolivia throughout history.

Let's see how much I can remember:
- when the spanish invaded bolivia and peru, they made chewing coca illegal because they thought it was 'diabolical'. it's interesting that this was before cocaine existed, so the leaf was not known as a drug...it was only made illegal because of the important social and spiritual role that it has for the indigenous people that spain was trying to convert to catholicism.
- when they noticed that productivity in the gold and silver mines dropped significantly when the miners couldn't chew coca, they actually did a complete 180 and made it mandatory for the miners to use coca and imposed a tax on its purchase.
- indigenous people have been using coca for ages as an anesthetic for medical purposes, the west didn't catch on until the late 1900s
- cocaine was never produced by bolivians or peruvians. it was western countries that came up with the refined product that quickly became a huge problem in the developped world.
- Freud was the first recorded cocaine user in the world.
- the main ingredient of coca cola was originally coca
- since cocaine became a problem in the west, political forces have been trying to cut it off at the source by making coca cultivation illegal. this in turn has all sorts of social and spiritual implications for indigenous people in Bolivia and Peru who still use coca on a daily basis (there are no known health problems associated with chewing coca). it is so important to the people here than they even use it as a currency for bartering in markets.

well, that's all i got for now. the moral of this story is - The coca leaf is not a drug!

Christine