Bolivia’s Quest to Spread the Gospel of Coca

One thing about chewing coca leaves that is weird to the neophyte is their specific, sylvan kind of taste. Unlike the chemical stain that cocaine burns on the back of the throat, coca can seem like a hippie cleanse for the mouth. To start, there is the inescapable fibrousness; even with some dexterous tongue and tooth work, little twig-like stems end up pressed against the inside of the cheek or stabbing at the gums. Then there is the flavor, a musty piquancy of autumn leaves suffused with a tannic tang. The effect is slightly astringent. Chewing is generally a misnomer, since coca is piled up into a wad on one side of the mouth and sucked on, but some people gnash at the lanceolate leaves until tiny green specks garnish the teeth like dried parsley.

When a person chews coca, a cocktail of compounds is secreted from the leaves and absorbed into the body. This contains dozens of alkaloids that include the cocaine compound, and it has mild psychotropic effects in its unprocessed form. Its processed form, obviously, is a different matter. People from Andean countries like to say that coca’s relationship to cocaine is like the grape to wine. The equivalence isn’t totally precise, but coca is a centerpiece in traditional ceremonies and has the status of a sacred substance and so it enjoys, like the Holy Eucharist, a certain factual leniency.

Of course, neither its natural consumption nor its spiritual status has saved the coca plant from becoming a harbinger of bloodshed. Coca garnered its peculiar status when a German graduate student isolated a pure form of its electrifying alkaloid from a fresh shipment of leaves in 1859 using alcohol, sulfuric acid, sodium carbonate and ether. Cocaine’s global market is now worth around 80 billion dollars per year. It is also illicit. An untold number of people have been killed for having some connection, tenuous or not, to the trade. Drug-related violence has made parts of Latin America among the most dangerous places on the planet.

Nowhere has coca been more important than in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country. Though its governments have traditionally toed the line of U.S. foreign policy on drugs since at least the 1980s, Bolivia’s current president, Evo Morales, threw out the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) nearly a decade ago while vowing to resuscitate coca’s sullied reputation. “Coca,” Morales has said so often that the phrase could be printed on the currency, “is not cocaine.” After decades of sweaty counter-narcotics operations, during which U.S.-trained soldiers scoured the jungle uprooting coca bushes and Americans and Europeans snorted cocaine anyway, Morales called a stop to eradication campaigns in his country. Instead, the cocaleros of Bolivia have cultivated the conviction that they can spread the gospel of coca. “Our philosophy is clear,” the country’s leading anti-drug official, Sabino Mendoza, told me. “Coca should be consumed, in its natural state.” To that end, the Bolivian government has spent millions of dollars and put forward a law to support its coca market. It has shunned the War on Drugs and sought instead to create alternate