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Outside Magazine October 2004

Outside's Guilty Pleasures
Coca Fiend
There's nothing as invigorating as a good chew

By Kate Wheeler

I GOT HOOKED ON COCA LEAF ten years ago, crossing an unmapped part of the Peruvian rainforest. Late in a day of falling into waist-deep slime, being bitten by ants, and clawing up mudslides, my expedition mates, our porters, and I crawled under a rock to escape the cold, driving rain. Huddled together, watching darkness fall on vertical swamps, it was easy to imagine how the last foreign visitors might have died out here.

The garbage bag of coca came out, big as a bed pillow. I'd been told by our German-Peruvian expedition leader that it was more important than food. The leaves smelled reassuring, like dogs' paws. I learned how to grab a few leaves, pick off the stems, fold, and stuff the wad (bola) between my molars. I added a few crumbs of mineral lime and the alkaloids in the leaves were activated. My lips went numb, and, subtly, things began to seem less dire. Soon we pushed on, miraculously finding a place to camp.

Moments of grace come easier if you're acullicando, as the Aymara, descendants of the Tiwanaku empire of Bolivia and Peru, call chewing coca. Who cares if you look like a green-drooling goat? Coca accompanied me on a walk from the Peruvian coast to the jungle, leaving a horizon behind each day. It made it possible for me to dance as a devil in the Gran Poder ("Great Power") festival in La Paz last June, where 45,000 costumed revelers pour through the city's streets to a heady mix of music, alcohol, and spiritual devotion. Friends warned against trying this daylong ordeal only 48 hours after landing at 12,001 feet. But I'd been a devil dancer four times already, and I'd be damned if I would sit it out. So I found a great tin mask—a skull with a knife stuck through it—and made a 12-cent investment in coca. Twice what I needed, but in the Andes, coca is for sharing, and the rigors of the dance make chewers of abstainers.

Compared with cocaine hydrochloride, the powdered drug made from it, coca leaf is relatively mild. It's also nonaddictive, and still legal in most of the Andean region, where it grows. It's definitely an antidepressant and endurance enhancer; it's used to treat ulcers and altitude sickness. If you chew all day, you get quite a boost, but you also get your daily requirement of calcium, iron, and vitamin A.

Of course, it may be the transgression I love most. I used to smuggle some coca leaves home through the Miami airport every summer. Then I learned it's a Schedule II narcotic, the same category as cocaine. That's crazy. I firmly believe coca should be legal all over the world. Things go better with coca. Isn't this as good a definition of a sacrament as any?

Next Page: A roughing-it guy gets fancy aboard the Queen Mary 2

Author KATE WHEELER frequently writes about her travels in South America.

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