Erythroxylaceae
Erythroxylum coca
Coca
- Part used
- leaf
- Native range
- The eastern Andean slopes of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador
- Morphology
- A shrub to three metres with small oval leaves marked by two curved lines running parallel to the midrib, small yellow-white flowers and red drupes.
What is in it
Evidence
The leaf itself is little studied in controlled conditions. Cocaine, isolated in 1860, was the first local anaesthetic and remains in limited clinical use in some ear, nose and throat surgery.
Safety
The traditional chewed leaf delivers a small quantity of alkaloid slowly and has a very different profile from the isolated drug. Cocaine is a controlled substance with severe cardiovascular toxicity and strong dependence liability. Coca tea will produce a positive drug test.
Regulatory: Coca is listed in the 1961 UN Single Convention, which Bolivia has formally contested and from which it withdrew and re-acceded with a reservation for traditional chewing. Illegal in Australia.
Historical use
Chewed with an alkaline ash or lime across the Andes for at least four thousand years, for altitude, hunger, cold and fatigue, and central to Andean ritual and social life. Coca leaf is legally cultivated and consumed in Bolivia and Peru and its cultural status is protected in Bolivian law.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Coca is the sharpest available illustration of the distinction this whole section rests on — between a plant and a compound isolated from it.
Chewed leaf delivers a small dose of cocaine slowly, buffered by alkali, alongside a mixture of other alkaloids and a useful amount of calcium. It has been used that way for four thousand years in the Andes with no meaningful dependence problem. Isolated cocaine, delivered rapidly, is one of the most reinforcing drugs known.
The international legal position treats them as the same thing. Bolivia's objection — that the 1961 Convention criminalised an indigenous cultural practice on the basis of a chemical extracted from it by Europeans — is a serious argument, and it is why Bolivia withdrew from the treaty in 2011 and re-acceded with a reservation protecting traditional use.
Cocaine also has a legitimate medical history: it was the first effective local anaesthetic, and every drug ending in -caine is a synthetic descendant designed to keep the anaesthesia and lose the rest.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.