An excerpt from the journal of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci indicates that the white men held a similarly low opinion of the coca chewers. It describes an encounter that took place in 1499, off the coast of what is today Venezuela.
We descried an island that lay about 15 leagues from the coast and decided to go there to see if it was inhabited. We found there the most bestial and ugly people we had ever seen: very ugly of face and expression, and all of them had their cheeks full of a green herb that they chewed constantly like beasts, so that they could barely speak. Each one carried around his neck two gourds, one of them full of that herb and the other of a white powder that looked like pulverized plaster. They dipped a stick into the powder, and then put the stick in the mouth, in order to apply powder to the herb that they chewed; they did this very frequently. We were amazed at this and could not understand its secret or why they did it.3
The green leaf Vespucci saw the natives chew was coca. The repression and prohibition of the derivatives of the coca bush is just one of a host of measures that served to banish specific peoples and cultures from Latin America. The conquistadores arrived in the New World fresh from a pan-European campaign of witch-burning, and had few qualms about putting what they considered demonic customs to the torch. Many of those customs, including use of the coca leaf, have only in the past twenty years begun to recover from the assault those first Europeans launched. Cocaine was invented by a European chemist 140 years ago, but the leaves of the coca bush from which cocaine is extracted have been chewed by Americans from Chile to Guatemala since 2100 BC.4 Coca was one of the first plants to be cultivated by the peoples of the Americas. The architects and workers who built Machu Picchu chewed coca leaves, as did the builders of the lines in the desert at Nazca, the incredible terraced agricultural laboratory at Moray, near Cuzco in Peru, and the 3,500-year-old temple at Kalassassaya in Bolivia.5
In the seventeenth century, European explorers brought back many mild psychoactive substances from the New World, including such staples of modern stimulation as coffee, tobacco and chocolate. The first Spanish settlers of the Andes had noticed how the Inca people used coca to suppress hunger and fatigue, and derived ‘great contentment’ from it. So why wasn’t coca part of that first wave? Europeans were not accustomed to smoking plants, but they took to smoking tobacco with gusto, perhaps because the habit was genuinely strange to them. The prevailing opinion of coca seems to have been akin to that of Amerigo Vespucci: the chewing of a wad of coca leaves reminded them of their cows.
Not only did the new masters of Peru not take to coca-chewing, the first Catholic missionaries saw that the practice was a key obstacle to converting the natives from paganism to Christianity because coca was the gateway to the native pantheon. The missionaries did, however, recognize the importance of coca to their new subjects, and how useful it might be to their mission in the New World. Coca offered physical as well as spiritual benefits to its users: it warded off hunger and tiredness, so the colonists supplied it to the miners who extracted silver from the mountains. Indigenous tradition had it that buying and selling coca leaves was sacrilegious; none the less, the coca plantations soon became the mainstay of the Peruvian colony, and many Spanish colonists paid their workers in coca. In the seventeenth century, the coca market of the silver-mining city of Potosí had a turnover twice that of the markets for food and clothing.6
With the commercialization of coca cultivation, a sacred plant became a tool to exploit the native workforce. This exploitation of Indian workers by Creole landowners, who were the proxies of the Catholic kings of Spain, created the American continent’s first drug dealers. As one contemporary wrote, ‘Our fair-minded masters do not want the poor to recognize their tragedy, and wish instead that they should die without realizing their hunger and their ignorance; that the bitter taste of coca might dull the instinct to rebel, and that they might live in an artificial paradise.’7 Seeing coca in its economic context—as a sacred plant made to serve the commercial interests of a distant empire—supplies us with an important lesson in how innocuous plants can become dangerous drugs.
Well into the twentieth century, Andean landowners paid their indigenous workers in coca leaves, a practice that resulted in malnutrition and supplied the case studies for a novel theory of drug addiction. In the 1940s, a Peruvian pharmacologist called Carlos Gutierrez Noriega developed a theory of ‘cocaism’, largely based on his observation of the coca-chewing habits of prison inmates. He assumed that indigenous Peruvians had been enslaved by coca, and that it was their coca-chewing that had landed them in prison. Noriega argued that the natives chewed coca leaves instead of eating, and that this was the cause of the malnutrition they were suffering. He called coca ‘the factor of greatest importance opposed to the improvement of the Indian’s health and social condition’. The Colombian government maintained that coca-chewing was physically debilitating, slowed the educational development of children, caused behaviour ‘incompatible with civilization and Christian tradition’, and ‘exacerbated sexual instincts’.8 Notwithstanding the fact that Gutierrez Noriega’s only experience of Indian culture was the time he spent in the prisons of Lima, whose inmates he used as the subjects for his experiments, he became the world’s foremost authority on the use of coca. In the years that followed, his critique of ‘cocaism’ became the standard interpretation of both coca and Indian poverty.
After 1938, the Colombian government restricted the sale of coca leaves to pharmacies. In 1947, it became illegal to pay salaries in coca leaves, or to cultivate or distribute coca. In 1952 the United Nations banned a practice going back thousands of years in the name of combating the very modern disease of ‘drug addiction’. The ban was only lifted in 1988, when the drug conventions were revised to make some allowance for traditional use of psychotropic substances such as coca and opium. Sandro Calvani, the former Colombian representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, wrote in 2007 that ‘these days there is sufficient empirical and scientific evidence to demonstrate that it is absurd to continue regarding the coca leaf as a dangerous drug or psychotropic, or the consumption of coca tea as evidence of “drug addiction”.’
The coca leaf contains B vitamins, and more iron and calcium than any other food crop indigenous to the high Andes. It relaxes the bronchial air passages in the lungs, which makes it easier to breathe at high altitudes, where oxygen is scarce. Chewing coca is also said to ward off the cold, and to have unrivalled anaesthetic effects. As its effects are short-lasting, it produces neither over-stimulation nor sleeplessness. About 8 million people in the Andean region chew coca regularly, which means that there are more coca-chewers in Latin America than there are cocaine users in North America.9
I met Daniel Maestre at the offices of the National Indigenous Organization (ONIC) in Bogotá. I had gone there hoping to talk to somebody about the ancestral use of coca and had been directed to where Daniel was quietly chewing coca as he waited for a friend to come out of a meeting. I asked him to what extent coca’s enduring appeal lay in its physical effects. ‘We say that the coca bush is an intelligent plant,’ he told me. ‘When you first chew it, it might make your tongue numb, but soon your body relaxes, so when you see someone who is used to chewing coca, you see how peaceful his face is. Coca is a relaxant, but more because of the slow and steady movement of the jaw than its chemical effects. The physical effects of chewing coca are barely perceptible.’
About 0.5 per cent of the chemical content of a coca leaf is cocaine. An Andean coca-chewer might get through 30 grams of leaves in a day, which yields the equivalent of 150 milligrams, or an average-sized line of cocaine. Just as anyone mainlining caffeine would experience physical effects quite distinct from those enjoyed by drinking a few cups of coffee in the course of the day, snorting 150mg of cocaine has effects hard to compare with those attained by the slow, steady absorption of coca through the mouth and stomach. Today, even the American Embassy in the Bolivian capital of La Paz advises recent
arrivals to sip coca tea until they get used to being 12,000 feet above sea level.
But the difference between coca and cocaine is not just one of intensity. Their users ascribe very different meanings to each. The Páez live in the Colombian province of Cauca. They are one of many indigenous communities that chew coca daily, but traditional Páez doctors also use coca in cleansing ceremonies. Every six months, a family will gather under a tree, and the doctor will chew a wad of coca leaves while swilling aguardiente (the local fire water) around his mouth. Then he’ll spit the wad on to the family’s pastures to keep the animals healthy and ward off evil spirits. When night falls, he’ll chew some more coca until he is able to distinguish those fireflies that are carrying good luck from those that are carrying bad luck. The latter he catches, bundles up with twigs and douses with coca leaves and aguardiente, before burying them in the ground.
Coca, myth and the rituals of daily life are intimately bound, as Daniel Maestre went on to explain. ‘My grandfather told me that the coca bush was once a very pretty woman. She was so pretty that everybody fought over her. Since not everybody could have her, the elders turned her into a plant, so that she could be enjoyed by everyone. What began as a source of division became a source of unity. When you get to puberty, the elders start preparing you to receive your poporo (a gourd). You mix the coca with ground-up seashells in the poporo. As you chew, the calcium from the shells releases all the beneficial chemicals and alkaloids from the leaves, and you start dreaming, thinking, remembering, listening and seeing. Coca represents the word of my grandmother, and the poporo the word of my wife. Coca is sweet like a woman, and it sweetens the words that come out of your mouth. It gives harmony to your words, and it makes conversation well balanced and meaningful. You feel a great sense of harmonious energy. You spend all your life with your poporo, just as you do with your wife, and, just as nobody likes to see another man touch his wife, so you don’t let other people touch your poporo.’
The prohibition of recreational drugs like cocaine, heroin and cannabis is a relatively recent departure from a tradition in which European and North American societies tolerated the use of a wide range of psychoactive substances. Until a hundred years ago, opium was a popular psychoactive on both sides of the Atlantic. America’s colonists regarded low doses of opium as a familiar resource for pain relief. Benjamin Franklin regularly took laudanum (opium in alcohol extract) to alleviate the pain of kidney stones during the last years of his life.10 Identifying and isolating the active ingredients of the opium poppy and the coca leaf was a vital first step in developing a mass market for these drugs. Nineteenth-century chemists busied themselves with decoding all kinds of previously ‘magical’ substances: codeine in 1832, caffeine in 1841, and then cocaine in 1859. But this isolation was not only a chemical process: it also sheared psychoactive substances from their specific cultural context. They could now be packaged as commodities, and sold to anyone with the money to buy them. Since these substances were no longer dispensed by healers, or reserved for special ceremonies, people had to learn how to take drugs all over again.
Initially at least, it seemed that Europeans and Americans were fast learners. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, expanding overseas markets fuelled the growth of manufacturing industries. A new class of white-collar workers, known as ‘brain workers’, struggled to keep pace with the demands of this economic boom. Brain workers needed stimulants to keep them going, but until the 1880s, the only stimulant available was caffeine. Cocaine filled this gap. It hit the mass market in two forms: patent and ethical. Patent preparations came from general food and grocery suppliers and typically contained unspecified amounts of coca leaf extract. Most coca products were tonics, and most contained relatively small doses of the active ingredient. Coca extracts and mild cocaine solutions immediately found favour as ‘pick-me-ups’ rather like the espresso coffees and energy drinks of today. The manufacturers ran slogans such as ‘Don’t lose time, be happy! If you’re feeling run down and fed-up, ask for cocaine,’ and ‘Strengthens and refreshes body and mind.’ One such concoction was coca wine, an infusion of coca leaves in red wine. The first person to buy coca wine in the United States was Abraham Lincoln, who paid 50 cents for a bottle of ‘Cocoaine’ in 1860, a month before he was elected President of the United States. The most popular brand of coca wine was ‘Mariani wine’, created by an Italian chemist called Angelo Mariani. He was called to the bedside of another American President, Ulysses Grant, who was suffering from cancer of the throat. Mariani found Grant being nursed by the writer Mark Twain, who was determined to keep Grant alive long enough to collect his memories of the American Civil War for his latest book. Mariani suggested that Twain encourage Grant to take coca wine for his condition. Grant soon affirmed that the enormous quantities of coca wine that he ingested daily were a great help, though he admitted finding it very hard to stop drinking it.
Mariani wine went on to become the most popular prescribed remedy in the world, lauded by the likes of H. G. Wells, Thomas Edison, Emile Zola, the Tsar of Russia and even Pope Leo XIII, who sent a gold medal to Angelo Mariani by way of thanks.11 Jules Verne, author of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, enthused that ‘since a single bottle of Mariani’s extraordinary coca wine guarantees a lifetime of a hundred years, I shall be obliged to live until the year 2700!’ Vin Mariani is produced in the Bolivian capital La Paz to this day, though its aficionados are much reduced in number and renown.12
Coca-Cola was another triumph of this first wave of cocaphilia, one of the many fruits of nineteenth-century globalization. It was also the zippiest beverage imaginable, widely available from soda fountains and popularly used as an antidote to hangovers. It started out as an attempt to side-step the nay-sayers of the city of Atlanta, who had ordained the prohibition of alcohol in 1886. The beverage then known as Peruvian Wine Cola emerged divested of its alcohol content, as a therapeutic combination of coca, caffeine and an extract of the African cola nut, the invigorating qualities of which had been celebrated by the Scottish explorer David Livingstone. With the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in the United States in 1914, however, the Coca-Cola Company was forced to remove the cocaine from their secret 7X formula, and the company stopped touting it as a tonic.13 The modern-day can’s red and white livery, taken from the colours of the Peruvian flag, is the only reminder of Coca-Cola’s Andean origins.
Aside from the patent preparations, the ethical coca preparations were supplied by Merck of Germany and Parke-Davis and Burroughs Wellcome of the United States, and the cocaine content of their preparations was clear and explicit. Between them, these pharmaceutical giants helped make cocaine one of the great pharmaceutical success stories of the late nineteenth century.14 By 1900, pure cocaine was selling for 25 cents a gram in the United States, and had become one of the nation’s top five best-selling pharmaceutical products.15 It was used as the principal active ingredient in everything from toothache drops to haemorrhoid plasters, inhalers, ointments, and even cigars. It was touted as a remedy for dyspepsia, an appetite suppressant, a cure for shyness in children and a general panacea for the sick and the listless. Cocaine, Parke-Davis proudly announced, ‘can supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and render the sufferer insensitive to pain.’16 It seemed to offer a cure for everything except rational scepticism. Readers of the Sears Roebuck catalogue in the 1890s were even offered, for a mere $1.50, a handy Parke-Davis cocaine kit, which came with its own hypodermic syringe.
In 1900, pharmacies around the world stocked 70,000 substances that contained psychoactive ingredients of one kind or another.17 Until 1907, practically any drug could be bought from chemists in the United States. The trade was legal, unregulated and unlicensed and the demand for coca leaves grew exponentially. Peru was the world’s biggest supplier of coca products: in 1900 its growers exported 10 tons of cocaine (today, annual exports of cocaine from Peru, Bolivia and Colombia are thought to be closer to 1,000 tons a y
ear). Commercial coca plantations were sown by Dutch colonizers far from the Andes, in the coffee-growing highlands of Java, where coca plants yielded higher cocaine content than anything ever seen in the Andes. Plantations were also sown by the Japanese in Taiwan, and by the British in what was then Ceylon. Some consumers chose to take cocaine in its most concentrated form, but it is important to recognize that most preferred to enjoy it as a soft drink. Cocaine’s origins as an ingredient in legal preparations have been obscured as twenty-first-century aficionados and prohibitionists alike have focused their attention on the drug in its most potent form. In the late nineteenth century, there was no drug scene. There were no coke-heads, drug dealers or crack-addicted prostitutes. Drug-taking was not commonly regarded as an escape from day-to-day life, nor was it a rite of passage into the glitterati, the literati or the cognoscenti. It was neither high class, low class or under class. Drugs were not a matter for the courts, politicians or educationalists, and they hardly ever warranted a mention in the papers, except as copy for advertisements.
The most worrisome mind-altering substance at the turn of the century was not cocaine or opium, but alcohol. Alcoholic drinks had been popular in the United States since the founding of the Republic, but from the eighteenth century onwards, drinkers had to contend with a strong temperance movement. American newspapers were chock-a-block with the yellow journalism of zealous moral entrepreneurs, who regularly claimed that booze lay at the root of most of the crime, insanity, poverty, divorce, illegitimacy and business failures in the United States. So when cocaine use was banned, it was as a small part of a much broader movement against all kinds of intoxication.
Cocaine Nation Page 3