The Leaf, the Alkaloid, and a Century of Arguing About the Difference

Coca's modern history is a long argument about whether a plant and a compound extracted from it are the same thing.

Cocaine was isolated from coca leaves in Europe in the mid nineteenth century and became a widely sold medicine and ingredient. The leaf and the isolate differ in almost every way that matters: the alkaloid content of a leaf is under one per cent, it is absorbed slowly through the mouth over a long chew, and the traditional preparation delivers nothing resembling the concentrated dose of the purified compound. Andean users have made this distinction for as long as the argument has existed.

International drug control has largely not accepted it. The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs listed the coca leaf itself and called for the eradication of coca chewing within a fixed period, a provision that treated a daily practice of millions of people, with religious and medical dimensions, as a habit to be abolished. Bolivia withdrew from the convention in 2011 and rejoined with a reservation preserving traditional chewing, and coca chewing is protected in the Bolivian constitution.

Eradication campaigns, aerial spraying and the violence that follows the illegal trade fall on growing regions where the leaf has been part of ordinary and religious life for millennia. The atlas records the leaf as a sacred plant and the alkaloid as a separate subject, because conflating them is precisely the error the dispute is about.