The Divine Coca Leaf Finally Gets Its Day: Wade Davis on ABC’s Sunday Extra

Potatoes and Vodka

Davis opens with an analogy so perfectly constructed it deserves to be carved in stone: “Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka.”  That struck me hard when David said that, because for years I’d been telling people the same, just with different analogies:

• Coca tea is to cocaine like grapes are to wine
• Coca tea is to cocaine like poppy seeds are to heroin

Nobody’s getting arrested for a lemon poppy seed muffin!  The “logic” of coca prohibition would demand exactly that your muffin should be seized from your hands by law enforcement.  Sound ridiculous?  Welcome to the world of coca madness.

Let that sink in. When customs agents seize coca tea from a traveller’s luggage, Davis notes, it’s “kind of like Eliot Ness busting a truckload of potatoes as a violation of the Volstead Act.” The absurdity is breathtaking once you see it clearly.

The coca leaf has been used by virtually every civilisation in the Andes and Northwest Amazon for at least 8,000 years. Eight thousand years of documented use as food, medicine, and sacred ritual—with no evidence of toxicity or addiction. And yet, since 1961, the United Nations has classified it alongside fentanyl and methamphetamine.

What Coca Actually Does

One of the most powerful moments in the interview comes when Davis describes the actual experience of using coca—not in clinical terms, but in human ones:

“If I were to tell you there was a plant you could take that would give you a certain kind of suspension of hunger, a mild kind of sense of stimulation that helped you be a little bit more creative, that allowed you to focus and concentrate with contentment for hours at a time, and yet had no lingering effects, and you could stop chewing at the end of the day and simply go about your dinner and your family, your run, whatever you do, and you found yourself your productivity increasing dramatically, along with your contentment and well being and the lightness to your foot that lasted all day. Wouldn’t that be interesting?”

Wouldn’t that be interesting indeed.

For anyone who has actually used coca leaf in its traditional form—as a tea, or chewed with a little bicarbonate—this description rings completely true. It’s not a high. It’s not intoxication. It’s a gentle, sustained clarity that makes the day feel possible. For some of us, it’s the difference between getting out of bed and not.

The Racism Baked Into Prohibition

Davis doesn’t shy away from the ugly history. In the 1920s, when physicians in Lima looked up into the Andes and saw poverty, illiteracy, and what they called “social pathology,” they needed a scapegoat. Confronting issues of land reform and economic justice would have challenged the foundations of their comfortable lives. So they blamed coca.

“Every conceivable ill was blamed on the plant,” Davis explains. “And this became part of the language of contempt.”

Here’s the devastating part: these were the very men who wrote the commission reports that shaped the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs—the treaty that still dictates international drug policy today. The language of prohibition was written by people whose values, in Davis’s careful academic phrasing, “were transparently reprehensible.”

He doesn’t use the word “racist” lightly. But in this case, he says, the language “can only be seen as hateful and racist.”

The Coca-Cola Exception

Perhaps nothing illustrates the hypocrisy of coca prohibition more starkly than Article 49 of the 1961 Convention. While the plant was being criminalised globally, one exception was carved out: Coca-Cola was permitted to continue importing coca leaves.

To this day, the company imports over 100 metric tons annually. The cocaine is extracted and sold on the legal pharmaceutical market. The remaining constituents go into the “secret formula” of a product that anchors a $300 billion enterprise.

So coca leaf is too dangerous for a Peruvian grandmother to chew, too criminal for an Australian to drink as tea—but perfectly acceptable as an ingredient in the world’s most ubiquitous soft drink.

As Davis notes, Coca-Cola doesn’t advertise this fact. But it is, he says, the coca leaf that “allows Coca-Cola to lay claim legitimately to its longtime slogan of being the real thing.”

A Personal Note

I need to step out of the reviewer’s chair for a moment and speak personally.

For several years, I operated Coca Tea Australia—and later, a sister operation in the United States. I imported coca leaf powder and tea bags openly, believing that a legal, traditional product derived from an ancient plant deserved to exist in the modern world.

I wasn’t operating in the shadows. I built websites, processed orders, and shipped packages. I received seizure notices from customs. I received stern letters. What I never received was a criminal charge, a court summons, or a knock on the door.

The authorities, confronted with someone importing actual coca leaf products for traditional use, couldn’t be bothered pursuing it seriously. The enforcement gap between the letter of the law and reality tells its own story about how absurd the prohibition is.

But more than the legal absurdity, what I remember most are the emails. Customers who wrote to thank me. People who told me the tea helped them with fatigue, with focus, with chronic conditions that pharmaceutical options hadn’t touched. Real people whose mornings I made possible.

That was the most satisfying work I’ve ever done. And I wasn’t allowed to keep going.

The Coca Leaf WHO Review: A Moment of Hope

For the first time since 1961, this coca leaf WHO review represents a genuine chance to undo decades of injustice. The World Health Organization is conducting a critical review of the coca leaf’s scheduling. Bolivia has been pushing for this for years, and now it’s finally happening.

The outcome is not guaranteed. The United States has historically opposed any rescheduling of controlled substances. Pharmaceutical interests benefit from a world where natural alternatives remain criminalised. The forces aligned against change are powerful.

But the arguments for liberation—Davis’s word, and the right one—are overwhelming:

• Nine million indigenous people could continue their traditional practices without criminalisation
• Over 200,000 farming families in Colombia alone could sever their ties to the cartels
• Tax revenue from legal coca could fund development in Andean nations
• Deforestation could be reduced by cultivating coca on already-cleared lands
• The world would gain access to what Davis calls “the most benign, effective, useful, helpful, mild, natural stimulant” known to humanity

And the cartels? They couldn’t care less about the legal status of the coca leaf. Their business is cocaine hydrochloride—a product that requires industrial processing, precursor chemicals, and clandestine laboratories. Liberating the leaf changes nothing about the sanctions on illicit cocaine production. As Davis puts it, suggesting the cartels would import coca leaves to extract cocaine is “about as ridiculous as suggesting that someone would import Dom Pérignon to extract pure, concentrated ethyl alcohol.”

Coca o Muerte

There’s a slogan in the Peruvian pro-coca movement: coca o muerte. Coca or death.

It sounds dramatic until you understand what Davis means when he says that for the Runakuna—the indigenous people of the Andes—to be without coca is “to experience a form of spiritual excommunication from existence itself.”

This isn’t about getting high. It’s not about drugs. It’s about a plant that has been central to human civilisation in South America for eight millennia—longer than recorded history in most of the world. A plant that is food, medicine, ritual, and identity.

The 1961 Convention didn’t just criminalise a substance. It attempted, in Davis’s unflinching words, “cultural genocide.”

Sixty-three years later, we have a chance to begin correcting that injustice.

Further Reading

Wade Davis has written extensively on this topic. His piece “The Secret History of Coca” in Rolling Stone provides a comprehensive overview of the plant’s history and the case for its liberation. His 2024 collection Beneath The Surface of Things includes an essay on coca that expands on many of the themes discussed in the ABC interview.

The Transnational Institute and the Washington Office on Latin America have been monitoring the WHO review process through their “Coca Chronicles” series, which includes a podcast episode featuring Davis.

And if you have 22 minutes, I urge you to listen to the original ABC Sunday Extra interview. It may be the most articulate defence of the coca leaf you’ll ever hear.

— Mike the Tea Lover, Coca Tea Australia (still here, still defiant)