Is a drug and it is bad.
Now that we've gotten that straightened out.
Cocaine!!!!!!
We found the Coca museum. I learned in Peru that sometimes when you ask someone (the concierge) if they know about a museum and they say no and then they tell you that it is probably closed anyway because it is Sunday, you should not listen to them. We finally found it and it was Libre because it was Sunday...FREE.
The museum had some very interesting exhibits. I didn't find out who sponsors the museum. I wish I had. You may wonder why have a Coca museum at all. Basically, the story is this. Andean peoples in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Western Argentina and Ecuador have used the coca plant for ages. To them, coca has great spiritual and cultural significance.
The leaves of the coca plant have been chewed by the Adean cultures for thousands of years. The plant itself was considered sacred and many human sacrifices had their mouths stuffed with leaves before they died. The museum had a very well preserved human sacrifice that was found with coca. I though it tasteless to take a picture of it, since it was a human life at one point. Obviously the picture below is not him.
Coca was also used medicinally. It is a stimulant and as such will
abate hunger and thirst. The tea is used to help overcome altitude
sickness. If chewed it will cause numbness in the mouth and was used as
an anesthetic. It is also said to help digestion.
This is the goddess Koka. According to lore, she appeared in the early days of the Inca Empire. She had green skin and hair and almond colored eyes. She was beautiful and all the men who knew her in the biblical sense(which apparently was a lot) were left sick with love for her. She loved 'em and left 'em. Some men killed themselves over their love pains. This was something that the society was not going to be cool with. The law enforcement went looking for her, but they too fell in love.
The Inca (which remember, we learned is the name for the ruling class of the Quechua people?) had the priests bring her to his court. He too started to get a little woo hoo for her, but stood strong against her charms. He had her killed and had her body parts buried in all different parts of the empire. However, he still had a deep pining for her.
Shortly after her body parts were buried, a small plant grew. It has leaves the shape of her eyes and was the color of her skin. The priests brought the leaves to the Inca who chewed them and found his great desire for the goddess disappear. He had them sent around the empire so that the other men could escape their pains too.
There is currently a bit of a fight happening internationally over the coca plant. Colombia, with lots of American dollars fueling the project, is spraying coca crops with herbicides and pesticides. It is a war against drugs thing.
In 1961 the UN held a convention where they decided that coca chewing needed to be done away with and that plants should be destroyed when grown "illegally". They also declared it an illegal narcotic listing it with drugs like cocaine, opium, morphine and heroin. In 1988 Peru and Bolivia tried to get the law amended stating the law “should take due account of traditional licit use, where there is historic evidence of such use.” They were denied. Bolivia continues to speak up about it. Their current president is a former coca farmer. He argues that farmers are not drug dealers and that denying farmers their livelihood is not right. He is calling for their ancestral right to chew coca.
An important note to keep in mind, Coca farmers don't benefit that much from the drug trade. They make very little for their effort.
Chewing coca leaves or drinking coca tea causes a mild stimulative effect and does not create any psychoactive or erratic behavior in the consumer. It does not act in the body like cocaine does. Because chewing coca is done with an acid (like quinoa ashes) to bring out the alkaloids, there are trace amounts of the cocaine alkaloid present in the bloodstream of the chewer. It is no where near what you would find in a cocaine or crack user and the effects are very different. The coca leaf is no more cocaine than poppy seed muffins are opium.
Coca is illegal in the US. Interestingly enough though, there is one place in the US where coca is legal. It is a plant in New Jersey and according to wikipedia, it produces cocaine for scientific study.
What's that now?
That's right friends. Guess what else it produces? An extract for Coca-Cola (cocaine free, of course) for that good old Coca-Cola flavor. According to the museum, they do it by using leaves that are already once used. Like making a second batch of tea with the leaves from your first batch.
The museum was really cool and eye opening. The only part that creeped me out was the plastic model of a man ODing in a bed.
And a tip of the hat to famous cocaine addicts.
They even had Whitney Houston up there. They are quick to update the exhibits.
This is a great website about the coca battle.
