In Peru, people sip tea made of coca leaves—the source of cocaine—like people elsewhere sip Earl Grey. The drink has a bittersweet, grassy flavor similar to a green tea like matcha and is mildly stimulating, like coffee. I have seen coca as an ice cream flavor near Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas and as a candy sold in tourist spots. At Lima’s famed Central restaurant, you can savor bread with smoked coca leaves, washed down with a coca-infused pisco sour.
Throughout the Andean countries, coca has been cultivated and consumed for thousands of years as a medicine, an element in religious rituals, and an energy booster for laborers. It is traditionally chewed with an alkaline ingredient, similar to tobacco chewing in the Americas and betel chewing in parts of Asia. “It’s good for the altitude,” my hiking guide told me in Spanish as we trekked up the 5,822-meter El Misti volcano.
“Just don’t bring it home,” my Peruvian friend Leonardo Porras said. “You could get in trouble.”
In my case, home is the Philippines. But Porras could have been referring to almost any country in the world, because outside of a few South American nations, possession of coca leaf, even for brewing tea, is illegal. While coca tea has the status of chamomile in Colombia, in most parts of the world it has the same legal standing as cocaine or methamphetamine. And it carries with it the same negative attitudes many people have about illegal drugs.
This discrepancy raises a dilemma among Andean countries: How can you reconcile cultivating a leaf that’s both a traditional beverage and the precursor to one of the most widely used illicit drugs in the world?
