People in the Andes have chewed coca leaves for at least 8,000 years
Leaves mixed with calcite, dug from ancient home floors in the Nanchoc Valley of Peru, show people chewing the plant at least 8,000 years ago, around the time farming took hold. Chewed or brewed as tea, the leaf gives a mild lift, and its traditional use has shown no evidence of addiction or withdrawal.
Coca is a shrub two to three metres tall with oval leaves, each marked by a pair of curved lines running beside the central vein, and small yellowish-white flowers that ripen into red berries. The dried leaves of the main Bolivian variety contain between 0.23 and 0.96 percent cocaine. Genetic work shows the four cultivated types were domesticated separately, two or perhaps three times, from a wild species by different South American peoples, and none of them now grows wild.
Under the Incas coca was woven into labour, religion and trade, prized enough that they colonised new land to grow it. Spanish colonisers first tried to stamp it out, then used it to keep enslaved workers going. Farmers can pick fresh growth several times a year, with the richest harvest in March after the rains. Bolivia, Colombia and Peru grow most of the world's crop and, according to a 2006 United Nations report, produce 99 percent of global cocaine.
The plant has travelled further than most people realise. Java became the world's top coca leaf exporter in the early 20th century, overtaking Peru by 1912, and Taiwan's plantations helped make Japan the leading cocaine exporter before the Second World War. In Colombia, aerial herbicide spraying under Plan Colombia led farmers to spread a naturally resistant strain nicknamed supercoca.
The 1961 United Nations Single Convention banned the leaf along with cocaine, a decision Bolivia and Peru have long contested on cultural grounds. Outside South America it is mostly illegal, with narrow exceptions such as the decocainized extract that flavours Coca-Cola. The drink contained real coca leaf extract from 1885 until about 1903.
Source: Coca
