Anyone here ever actually try coca leaves? Going to guess its effects are somewhere between coffee and cocaine
I used to drink coca tea a lot when I lived in Argentina where you get it in the supermarket. It's around on par of nicotine as an appetite suppressant for me, as a stimulant I feel caffeine and mate are better for the "stay awake" but coca tea is better for "zoning in", with less of anxiety driving but it's a more single tasked high where interruptions are harder to deal with than with caffeine. Like if I have a lot of meetings I prefer coffee and if I have to code for four hours I prefer coca tea. I used to rotate coffee, mate, and coca tea as a daily driver and having something else on the rotation may have been helping more than that something else being coca tea.
I used them while hiking in Peru.
It's better than caffeine, because it comes with a mild euphoria. Nothing crazy, just enough to have energy and not feel like hiking at altitude is work.
When I hike with coffee I just feel determined to finish. With Coca it just felt natural to keep walking.
I think it's pretty common for visitors to Macha Picchu to receive a cup of coca tea upon arrival, for altitude sickness. The people I talked to said it was like a cup of coffee.
I can attest to the magical effects against altitude sickness.
Had a lot of them chewed or in tea in Bolivia and it's pretty close to a caffeine buzz, it's very, very mild.
Only coca tea. It's a small boost, perhaps like coffee if you don't drink coffee everyday
Can anyone with a scientific background give an opinion about the first comment to the linked post? They say they are sceptical because "there are a number of Tropane alkaloids which are very close to cocaine and are present in other plants - especially nightshades (e.g., belladonna) - which were known to and used for various purposes by Europeans for a long time."
As you would expect, this is covered in the actual paper [0]:
> Therefore, the 3rd molecule detected in the brain tissues of our subjects, hygrine (an alkaloid present in the leaves of Erythroxylum spp. only), was essential to determine that the molecules detected in these human remains derived from the chewing of coca leaves or from leaves brewed as a tea, consistent with the historical period.
If I'm reading this right, they checked for a number of markers and one of those is found only in coca leaves.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032...
Author here, I had the same question and looked into it. The author of that comment seems to be onto something because hygrine is indeed found in nightshades as well as in coca. Interesting.
Thank you! I should have thought of checking the paper first
The research group behind the paper looks reliable, they have a publication record in the area and while it's surprising they can detect metabolites (and surprising that brains were preserved from the 1600s) they seem to have done a lot of detailed work, here's some of their other related work (they also found cannabis residues in some of their material):
"Forensic toxicological analyses reveal the use of cannabis in Milano (Italy) in the 1600's (2023)"
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Forensic-toxicological...
>As you can see, the Times was not the only news outlet to be confused about the distinction between cocaine and coca
Unfortunately, the author of this article is the one who is confused. Cocaine is the name of the alkaloid present in the coca leaf, much like the coffee bean contains caffeine. If they were using coca leaf, they were using cocaine.
TFA literally already says what you said. They're making a reasonable distinction between chewing coca leaves for mild stimulant effect and huffing a fat rail of the pure stuff.
It gives the wrong idea to say these 17th century people were doing cocaïne.
They were using cocaine. It was a less concentrated form, sure, but it’s still using the same substance for a psychoactive effect.