Be-leaf me!

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit a museum that was fascinating! It´s the Museum of Coca, dedicated to the crazy plant and its products, such as Coca Cola and cocaine. I also had the chance to visit the National Archaeological Museum and one thing about it that was fascinating is that there were sculptures of the Tiwanaku people who lived here a couple of thousand years ago, before the Incas, and many of the sculptures showed them with a bulge in their cheek....coca leaves!

The effect of chewing a coca leaf has been equated to drinking a cup of coffee. Obviously, the more leaves you chew on, the larger grows the bump in your cheek, and presumably the more effect the leaves have. For thousands of years, the people of this area have chewed on coca leaves in order to give them more energy when the need arose.

After the conquistadors arrived, the need arose more frequently. For more than three centuries, the Spanish and others got the Indians to work under terrible conditions in the mines by providing them with coca leaves. In the silver mines near Potosi, over 9 million miners died in the course of 3 centuries earning huge sums of money for the mine owners, and government leaders going all the way back to Spain. Historians say that 7 out of 10 mine workers died from the conditions in the mines.

In the late 1800´s, a clever Frenchman put coca oil in his wine which he called Vino Marianni. His wine sold like hotcakes. Sales were helped considerably by the fact that Pope Leo XIII endorsed the drinking of it and gave the inventor a gold medal. Dr. Pemberton, an American pharmacist, decided to put coca extract together with the juice from the cola nut into a "soft" drink. His timing was great. Prohibition arrived and what better substitute for alcohol!

The museum has an article from a Bolivian newspaper claiming that in the 1980´s, the Coca Cola company exported 200 tons of coca leaf out of Bolivia. The company at the time insisted that they used the coca leaf only for its flavor, and they did not process cocaine with it. In the meantime, no doubt, they´ve come up with something else that approximates the flavor of the coca leaf. Needless to say, it´s been impossible to find out the secret recipe of Coca Cola for over a century.

The museum is private and survives off the entrance fees. At least, so insists the ticket-taker, who said they receive no support from the government or the coca growers. I came away feeling that, on the whole, the exhibits were relatively balanced as to both the virtues and drawbacks of coca. There was an exhibit on cocaine, showing the terrible consequences on people who all too quickly become addicted to the drug.

For centuries, coca has been known to help with altitude sickness. In Sucre, a pharmacist gave me some capsules, but told me to drink coca tea upon arriving in La Paz. If the choice at breakfast in the hotel had been coffee or coca tea, I probably would have opted for the coffee. However, regrettably, the coffee in the hotel, as is typical around South America, is instant Nescafe. Yuck! Coca tea comes packaged in a neat little bag, just like Lipton. I opted for the coca tea. I usually seek out a righteous coffee shop for my espresso in the afternoon. In terms of some sort of energy boost, the coca tea did nothing for me. The tea is a very weakened form of putting the leaf in your mouth. However, the best news is tht I had no altitude headache whatsoever! And I had had a little bit of a headache when I first arrived. I´d rather have a cup of coca tea in the morning than swallow ibuprofin during the course of the day.

According to the museum, coca expands the ends/lobes/pores, whatever the word is, of your bronchial passages and helps you absorb a bit more oxygen with every inhalation.

The downside to coca, of course, is that it can be made into cocaine. All of us are all too aware of the terrible consequences of becoming addicted to cocaine. Monkeys in tests would pass up food and sex in order to bang the paddle as much as 4000 times an hour trying to get the dispenser to cough up more cocaine. Not good.

Evo Morales, in his successful political bid for President of Bolivia, was supported by the coca farmers, rose to political power by urging liberalization of coca laws and even held up a coca leaf as an audio visual aid in his first speech to the United Nations in NYC. His colleague Hugo Chavez announced about a month ago that Venezuela will import more Bolivian coca for "medicinal purposes."

The US, with 5 percent of the world´s population, consumes 50 percent of the world´s cocaine. The US has attempted to eradicate coca in the past by putting heavy political pressure on Bolivia, providing lots of money, military hardware such as helicopters, military advisors, etc., in its attempt to eradicate it. I can´t help but think it´s kind of like trying to eliminate the problem of winos by wiping out grapes. The US government is going to have to dream up some more ingenious ways if they want to get Bolivia to reduce its production of coca.

Hasta luego!