Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis on the many benefits of coca and how to liberate coca from its undeservedly tarnished reputation.
Bios of Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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Tim Ferriss: I thought, Andy, we could start with the ethnobotanical, medicinal side of things because I’ll share, perhaps, an anecdote to kick us off, which was I — as both of you have spent a lot of time in South America, and it’s not always to end up in the lower, upper Amazon consuming questionable substances. It’s sometimes to do other things, like visit cities and spend time with friends and go skiing.
And the skiing in this case was in Chile and it was the first instance where we landed in Santiago, drove to elevation very quickly, and I had my first experience with terrible altitude sickness. And for those who have not experienced it, I do not wish it upon my worst enemy. It is an absolutely horrific experience. It’s terrible. And even though the legal status, I think, is a question mark, or maybe it’s very directly verboten in Chile, the locals in the lodge gave me coca leaf tea. And within several hours, no symptoms and they did not recur past that point. Which blew my mind, particularly since even with Diamox to help with altitude acclimation, my experience has been that it takes a few days.
And I did not have any good way to explain this, particularly given my levels of exertion and. Not surprisingly in other countries, whether it’s Peru, Colombia, certainly if you look at the Kogis and so on, this plant is not just incredibly important from a, let’s just call it for lack of a better term, religious perspective, a cultural perspective, but also medicinal perspective. So I was hoping, Andy, you could give a primer on what makes coca, the plant, interesting?
Andrew Weil: Let me say I first met coca in 1965. I just finished my first year of medical school and my mentor, Dick Schultes, who was director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, sent me to South America to collect medicinal plants with one of his graduate students in the Amazon and the Andes. And I met with him right before I left and he said, “When you’re in Peru, be sure to chew coca.” He said, “It’s a very interesting plant and you want to learn about it.”
So I did, and I have been using coca ever since. And my original interest was to find out how this was used by Indigenous peoples medicinally. It’s as important to that population as peppermint and chamomile are in European medicine. It’s their major medicinal plant. And the main indication is for treating GI disorders, but also it is obviously relied on to provide energy in doing physical work, to help with altitude sickness, as you mentioned, to boost mood, and to improve metabolism.
The population in the Andes especially is often not well nourished and they eat a very high starch diet. They have a high incidence of genes predisposing them to type 2 diabetes, but they don’t have diabetes if they are on their traditional diets and exercising and chewing coca. But if they move to lower altitude and stop chewing coca and eat more like the blanco population in Peru, they develop very high rates of type 2 diabetes. So that’s quite interesting, that it has some normalizing effect on blood sugar and metabolism, which is something that I’d really like to see good research on.
So I think there are multiple uses, and these are not attributable to effects of cocaine. And I think this is most important that in coca, there are 14 alkaloids. Cocaine is one of them. And they all have similar chemical structures and none of them have ever been studied. Once we isolated cocaine from the leaf, everybody lost interest in everything else. So we don’t really know what those other things do and how they modify the activity of cocaine. The amount of cocaine in coca is relatively small. It would not be worth anybody’s time on a home scale to try to extract cocaine from coca. You need a tonnage of leaves to get a significant amount.
But I think the most important point is that this whole complex of compounds acting together is responsible for the effects that people report as being very beneficial, both for mental health and physical health.
Tim Ferriss: Could you say more about the digestive or metabolic effects? Do we have an idea of the mechanism of action there, what it’s actually doing?
Andrew Weil: Well, coca has been remarkably little studied. For a plant of such enormous historical, cultural, economic, scientific, medical importance, there is an almost complete absence of research on it, and Wade can talk about the reasons for that.
But one of the things that struck me when I was interviewing people in the Andes about the GI effects was that the respondents said that it treated both diarrhea and constipation. That doesn’t make any sense from the point of view of Western pharmacology. Cocaine is a gut stimulant. So obviously it’d be great for constipation, but it couldn’t do anything for diarrhea, except make it worse. And that always puzzled me. But then looking at these other coca alkaloids, there’s something peculiar about them. If you look at the structural formula of the molecules, they resemble drugs like atropine and scopolamine, which are found in nightshade plants and those are gut paralytics. Scopolamine has been used in medicine to treat diarrhea.
So this is kind of a paradox. You’ve got a molecule that, just from its shape, you predict would be a gut paralytic, but in fact, cocaine is a gut stimulant. So how does this work? I think this is a model for the differences between a whole plant drug and an isolated compound. I think when you present the body with this mix of ambivalent molecules that they push and they pull against physiology, the body decides what it wants to use. And that’s not attributing mystical intelligence to the body. It may be which receptors are available for binding at the moment. So if there is an overactive gut motility, it selects the ones that slow that down. That’s fascinating to me that coca has this sort of paradoxical activity and the body can choose which action it wants.
Tim Ferriss: So beyond, let’s just say, the motility, making bowel movement regular for lack of a better descriptor, is it ever used by Indigenous populations for what we might consider illnesses like Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel syndrome? I don’t even know what the occurrence of those things would be in such populations, but is it used for other indications?
Andrew Weil: It’s a great remedy for all GI disorders, and also they believe that it helps them utilize the nutritional qualities of foods that they consume. They often feel that if they don’t follow a meal, one of their high starch meals with a chew of coca, that they don’t metabolize it well.
There has been almost no research on this, but there was one really interesting study done with Andean Indians, having them ride exercise bikes and measuring blood sugar at intervals after they gave them a glucose load. And at any point in the cycle where they began to chew coca, blood sugar would normalize. So this is just one study that was done some time ago. And I mean, gosh, that should just call out for a whole lot more work of that kind. That’s fascinating.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super fascinating. So I wanted to just mention a few things for folks pulling from what you just said. So you mentioned Dick Schultes. If people don’t recognize the name Richard Evans Schultes, I guess that’s, what, S-C-H-U-L-T-E-S, look him up. Do yourself a favor and look up Richard Evans Schultes, the bio on Richard.
Andrew Weil: And Wade was his graduate student.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Yeah.
Andrew Weil: I worked with him as an undergraduate, but that’s how Wade and I first met, through him.
Tim Ferriss: So just incredible. And I may come back to the peppermint chamomile sidebar that you had because that seems interesting in and of itself, but to your point of isolated components of a plant versus the whole plant, there are many historical examples of this. One that we could pull from that can show perhaps the pitfalls of isolation, not to say there aren’t applications of isolations, it’s better to take something like aspirin than white willow bark perhaps, but if scientists came to the premature conclusion that, well, if consuming foods with beta-carotene seems to be supportive to vision, why don’t we just mainline isolated beta-carotene? Turns out not to be a great idea. There’s a lot more research needed.
Wade, do you want to speak to your first introduction, encounter with coca, and perhaps speak to why rehabilitation is even needed? I think some people might jump to the conclusions, like, “Well, cocaine, drug trade, period, end of story,” but I suspect there’s probably more there.
Wade Davis: Well, the thing is, Tim, I mean, coca has been used in South America by virtually every culture of the Andean and Northwest Amazon for 8,000 years. And during that time, there’s been no evidence whatsoever of any toxicity, let alone addiction.
My first encounter was actually with Tim Plowman, a good friend of Andy’s, who introduced me to Andy, who had a great grant through Schultes to study coca in the 1970s. And it spoke to the fact, what Andy said, is how little was known about the plant. I mean, one of the most astonishing things is that the plant had been demonized from the 1920s, and yet no one had ever bothered to do a nutritional study until Tim and Jim Duke did that and published in 1975. And Andy was sort of part of that team and the results were extraordinary. Not only did it have a modest amount of the alkaloid absorbed benignly in the mucous membrane of the mouth, but it was chock-full of vitamins and proteins, more calcium than any other plant studied. As Andy alluded to, enzymes that perhaps enhanced the ability of the body to digest carbohydrate at a high elevation. This was food and medicine, utterly benign. And the question comes, why didn’t someone do a study? And they didn’t do a study because they didn’t want to know.
I think the single most disturbing fact about coca is that the efforts to eradicate the fields, the traditional fields of coca, began 60 years before there was a cocaine problem. It had nothing to do with the pharmacology of cocaine hydrochloride and everything to do with the cultural identity of the Indigenous people who revered the plant.
And what happened is physicians in Lima in particular looked up into the Andes and they saw social pathologies, illiteracy, poor nutrition, poverty. And because issues of economics and land reform and real economic justice challenged the foundation of their bourgeois lives in Lima, they had to find a culprit and they settled on coca.
Andrew Weil: My observation is that Peru is actually a country with two nations within it. There is the white European nation with its capital at Lima that has alcohol as its preferred psychoactive drug, and there’s the Indigenous population mostly living at high altitude and some in the Amazon that rely on coca. And those two cultures have been at war with each other ever since.
For the Europeans, coca-chewing became a symbol of Indigenous culture and everything they didn’t like. And what they would love to see is either eradicate that culture or have it turn into the same as them.
Wade Davis: Well, I mean, these efforts were really pernicious and based on pseudoscience. And during all those years, including a famous commission dispatched in the late 1940s by the UN to study the so-called coca problem, that commission led by a man called Howard Fonda, who was a pharmaceutical executive, announced its conclusions before leaving New York. And upon arrival in Lima, reiterated word for word those same conclusions, that the plant had to be eradicated. And they spent three months in the Southern Andes meeting with military officials, alcaldes, government officials, priests. They didn’t interview a single traditional user of the leaf, and naturally they concluded that this plant had to be eradicated.
And I think if you really look at the language that they used, it was not just dark, it was racist. And that alludes to what Andy is saying that until recently, Latin America, not just Peru, was very much a place of conqueror and conquered, and coca became the symbol of everything Indigenous and therefore shameful to these elites.
Andrew Weil: Wade, do you want to say something about the recent WHO study, which is a confirmed continuation of all this?
Wade Davis: Incredibly, this condemnation of coca was in language that was just so dark and racist. And the amazing thing, though, is that these very people with their pseudoscientific studies and their hideous approach and language, were the very ones who wrote the language of the regulations and conventions that dictate international drug policies to this day, including the 1961 UN declaration on narcotic drugs. And in all of this time, there’d been no effort to actually identify the real value of the plant, and efforts have been underway more recently to get coca descheduled or rescheduled. In the UN system, coca leaf is now scheduled alongside with fentanyl and heroin as among the most dangerous drugs in the world. And the efforts that we’ve been trying to do is to get it to either be scheduled to the point where it’s seen to be of problemed but medicinal potential, or better yet, descheduled altogether so that we can create a licit market for the plant.
And here’s the reason for that. We have 250,000 families in Colombia that grow coca to survive. We need to give them a licit outlet for their product. Colombia, as a nation, needs the revenue, the tax revenue that can come from the international commercialization of the leaf to pay for the cost of peace. Having drained its treasury for 60 years to pay the cost of a war that would’ve not lasted a day without the sordid profits of prohibition. And above all, the world’s population has a right to benefit from this plant.
Andrew Weil: We have an enormous substance abuse problem in our country, and a lot of it has to do with stimulant abuse. And there’s also the problem of I think the reckless prescribing of stimulants to kids.
Tim Ferriss: Andy, could I ask you to bookmark that for a second? Because I want to give people a window into coca leaf so they understand the subjective experience for a second.
Andrew Weil: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: In Peru and other places — I mean, shocking to me, I think it was in Peru where I saw they were selling boxes of coca leaf tea in the international departures wing and I was like, “Guys, I want to take this with me but I can’t.”
The subjective effect of drinking coca leaf tea is, among other things, a stimulant effect that is far less for me than a half a cup of coffee, but without the subsequent crash that may be due to any number of things. I think it could be a glucose spike and then the subsequent crash, but it is very, very, very mild.
Andrew Weil: Okay. Now we have to say that coca leaf tea is not the most efficient way to use coca.
Tim Ferriss: No, it isn’t. It isn’t.
Andrew Weil: The traditional way is to hold leaves in your mouth and moisten them, add an alkali, which promotes absorption of the alkaloids, and let it slowly diffuse into the bloodstream. Now, I don’t think people up here are going to chew a mouthful of leaves, but I’ve always thought we could make a lozenge or a chewing gum that would reproduce that effect.
Tim Ferriss: Well, you could have a snus packet, like nicotine.
Andrew Weil: Yeah. Right, right. But the stimulant effect is so much milder, and Wade can talk to this too, I think than coffee for example, more than any of the pharmaceutical stimulants.
Wade Davis: The really fascinating literature is in the late 19th century, when physicians traveling in Peru were aware of the hazards of cocaine, but not yet judging the leaves reflexively. And the reports have this ingenuous quality, Tim, like, I mean, there’s one from the head of the British Medical Association who was 78 years old, and he gets up in the morning, walks halfway across Scotland, climbs a mountain, gets down, doesn’t eat all day, and says, “Well, that was quite a day.” In other words, there’s this — Mortimer calls it, like, “the stimulant that’s not a stimulant.”
And so this is really the way the plant operates, the subtlety of it. You don’t feel you’re stimulated. You just recognize the results of having been able to focus, concentrate, and remain at task in a creative way through a long period of time. If we do a little thought experiment. If I told you there was a plant that you could take that gave you a slight lightness of being, a slight kind of skip in your step, a sense of well-being that eliminated all these sort of existential little neuroses that we all suffer as conscious beings, and it allowed you to focus at task whatever that creative task was, whether it was a spinning of wool or the writing of digital code, and you could sit at task all day long concentrating on task with immense focus, with no sense of being under the influence of any plant, nothing as harsh as a second cup of coffee, and you found yourself at the end of the day ready to go home, have dinner, and do it all over again the next day, the truth is that coca has this capacity to improve our lives.
Andrew Weil: It also helps with weight management, Tim, because it makes you less hungry and feeling like you want to move. So that is a very desirable thing that many people would find useful. And I think the mood elevating effects of coca are very significant.
Tim Ferriss: Let me ask a question on the mind of a lot of listeners. I’ll also just add in, I have used the sort of mouth buckle in the form of, goes by a million different names, Mambe or whatever. And even in that case, very, very mild. And what I would say if I were to compare it to other things, as my long-term listeners might imagine, I’ve tried modafinil, I’ve tried the various amphetamines, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera, and the difference is that, number one, you have thousands of years of human use documented in the case of coca.
Secondly, I did not seem to develop any type, I’m sure you do, develop some tolerance. But for instance, if I use modafinil for two or three days and I stop, I immediately feel a physical requirement to use it to get back to my prior baseline. And that does not happen in the case of coca. It certainly happens in the case of caffeine for me.
Andrew Weil: And cocaine.
Tim Ferriss: And cocaine. Right. But the question I want to ask is, Wade, you mentioned this enormous number of families dependent on growing coca. And on an individual level, I can see how, hey, if you ship me a small box of coca leaf for my personal use, there’s no way I’m going to convert that into cocaine. But how do you on a national level, if these farms are preexisting, decouple the good of licit coca while simultaneously constraining the evils of cocaine production? Is that possible?
Wade Davis: Well, I mean, the thing there is that the status of coca has no relevance whatsoever to the cartels. With coca as a prohibited substance, they’ve made fortunes, shipping cocaine by the ton for 50 years in the United States. And were coca leaves to be legal with a licit commercial export market, you would still maintain the same controls over the illicit production of cocaine that you have today. So it’s kind of irrelevant.
The critical thing is that crop substitution programs are an illusion because how do you transport to market cacao or bananas when you can take coca paste and put it in your mochila and walk down the trail? And so this expansion of coca production is going on dramatically and it’s having huge impacts on tropical rainforests. The deforestation since the peace agreement in Colombia is very disturbing. And yet we have millions of acres of already cut over land that we could cultivate coca on for the well-being of the people.
And I think it’s worth just thinking about the history of this plant, 8,000 years, one of the most amazing things about coca is that it’s been domesticated not once, not twice, but three separate times in human history. That is unheard of.
Andrew Weil: And Tim, I think one approach to the problem you brought up is education, which I’m a great believer in. I think if people knew what coca was and understood its benefits, they would demand it, they’d want it. And that includes even people who use cocaine. I have known a number of people who got strung out on cocaine and experienced a lot of negative effects from it. And when they tried coca and used it properly, they saw that it was a much more desirable state and they didn’t want to use cocaine anymore. I think that’s something we could do.
By the way, I should also mention that through an accident of history, coca is in Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act, not Schedule I like cannabis and psychedelics. It got there. And Schedule II is substances that have a high potential for abuse but have recognized therapeutic application. It’s only there because cocaine has limited uses as a medical drug in ophthalmology and dentistry, but that makes it a little easier to leverage coca out of that controlled substance box. It’s just a matter of demonstrating that there are therapeutic applications that the FDA could approve.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so I want to fill in a gap and then come back to problem solving. But before we get to the problem solving and policy work, I’ll plant a seed, which is if these farmers suddenly could legally ship product for export or domestic use in the form of coca, could they actually get around the cartel or would they be putting a bullseye on their forehead? That’s a question not for now, but for later.
What I’d like to talk about first is the indigenous cultural context in which coca is used and its importance, right? Because as you mentioned, I mean, it’s not exactly ubiquitous in South America, but in a handful of countries, coca is considered, for lack of a better term, a master plant, and a sacred plant.
Wade Davis: First of all, there are four different varieties that Tim Plowman identified of cultivated coca, two species each with two different varieties. And we now know that from DNA analysis that the progenitor of all four varieties was a wild coca called Erythroxylum gracilipes that grows along the eastern flanks of the Andes, in La Ceja de la Montaña, all the way from Venezuela down to Bolivia. And what this means is that, at three times in pre-Columbian history, human beings came upon this delicate little shrub in the forest with fruits, the color and the size of rubies and beautiful little white flowers and delicate foliage and said, “Ha, that’s the one.” And it was domesticated three times in the Montaña of Colombia, in the Yungas of La Paz in Bolivia and Peru, and in the Northwest Amazon. And that is extremely rare in the history of plant domestication.
And not only was it domesticated three times, everywhere it was domesticated, it was deemed to be the plant of all plants, the sacred plant. And that was its status through all of at least 8,000 years and remains its status amongst those who use the plant today.
Andrew Weil: Today, if you watch indigenous people using coca, very often they make what’s called a k’intu, which is an offering. They take three perfect leaves and put them together in a fan shape and blow on them and will whisper prayers to them. And this is a very common thing to observe [crosstalk]
Wade Davis: It’s more than that, Andy. When people meet on the trail, they make a cruceta of leaves and then they lift it to the highest sacred mountain, blow it —
Tim Ferriss: Wait, what is that? Cruceta? Just to provide context for people.
Wade Davis: A little cross of three leaves, three perfect leaves. And first of all, you point it to the mountain and then you blow the energy of the leaf to the mountain. And the metaphor is the energy leaf — like in the same way a cloud condenses to bring rain and fertility to the soil, so too this is creating your sort of connection to landscape. And every single thing that happens in the Andes, a field is planted, coca is sprinkled. Tools are brought back in the evening, coca is given to them. Coca appears as a symbol of the social contract and the social nexus of people.
This is why it’s so important, as the anthropologist Catherine Allen said, is that to deny people coca in the Andes is not like denying the Germans beer or the British tea or the French coffee. It’s actually an act of cultural genocide because you cannot be runakuna, you cannot be of the Andes, of Pachamama, if you do not use the leaves. And you must use them properly, and nothing causes more offense than tourists who stuff their leaves, as the people say, like horses eating hay.
And in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the highest consumption of coca in the world, men are constantly chewing hayo.
Tim Ferriss: What is hayo?
Wade Davis: Hayo is a name of coca in Colombia. That is erythroxylum novogranatense, a variety of novogranatense, which is a coca of Colombia and the coca used today by the mamas of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. But they contemplate the day to come, they contemplate the day that they’ve lived. You begin to chew leaves when you are of an age to marry. And so the chewing of leaves is the expression of the essence of who you are as a people, and that happens to be a culture that believes that their prayers literally maintain the cosmic balance of the world. And so in all of these societies, the act of chewing coca is an act of being alive and to be denied the use of coca is to suffer a kind of existential eradication that is complete.
Now to be fair, indigenous people throughout the Americas have the right to use coca in most jurisdictions, but of course the cost of coca skyrocketed with the illicit market. And so there are many communities where the tradition of using coca is being lost simply because of the price of the leaves. But again, the issue for us, I think, in our initiative is not just a traditional use of the leaf, but the right of all peoples in all places in the world to benefit from the incredible gift that this plant represents. It’s Latin America’s greatest gift to the world and it’s one that’s been denied in a way that’s been incredibly unproductive.
Tim Ferriss: I guess potatoes are a pretty good gift too, right? So let me come back. I promised to do a call back to the question that I had bookmarked. I mean, doing homework for this in conversation with you guys, also lots of text messages and so on, I mean, it seems like there are many reasons that if one could wave a magic wand to create a licit trade of coca, it would be a good idea. You would have dramatic impact on indigenous land rights, you would curtail deforestation because things wouldn’t be pushed to the outer edges where they can be better hidden. Certainly the sustenance and viability of these communities who are already operating farms. Not to mention the potential global impact if this were to be more widely available, certainly pending or parallel with lots more research, right? There’s a lot of good that could come of it.
Could these farms be converted to legal trade without these farmers having a bullseye painted on their head by cartel who are dependent on them for producing their product?
Wade Davis: It’s not as if the cartels are going to roll over and say, “Oh, great. Sell your tea to Andy Weil, Inc.” On the other hand, the point is that the cartels are already out of control in Colombia and doing whatever they want anyway and they will continue to grow coca as they want to grow coca and continue to produce enormous quantities of illicit cocaine. Whether or not individuals will be free to grow coca with impunity, obviously there’s going to be conflict. But if the state has a national interest in the cultivation, a licit cultivation of coca, they’ll have an interest in protecting those who are growing the coca. It’s not going to be some kind of smooth transition.
But the point is that the situation in Colombia, for example, is already completely chaotic with the production having skyrocketed since the peace agreement and parts of the country now being inaccessible and that’s really a failure of leadership by the federal state. But I don’t think that’s a reason not to move forward with creating a licit product for the farm families who have been waiting for this.
Tim Ferriss: Andy, maybe you could speak to this next, just to rotate here. What is the wedge in the door, right? Because this would be a big long-term undertaking to rehabilitate coca. So what are sort of tangible next steps you think would move the needle in a positive direction? Is it funding research? Is it pilot programs of some type for legal products? What do you think?
Andrew Weil: I think it’s got to be multi-pronged. One is creating consumer demand for it, creating a market in North America for coca. If people want it, if consumers want it, that will move the needle quite a bit.
Secondly, there have to be FDA-recognized approved uses of it, which there now are not. And that has to be demonstrated, has to be supported by research. Some obvious ones are for the treatment of GI disorders, for treatment of substance abuse disorders. I think possibly for treatment of ADHD, for example, with a much safer stimulant. I think the metabolic indications, there’s great potential there that needs some research to demonstrate that. But if this shows potential for preventing or treating type 2 diabetes, that would be enormous. And I think we can make a list of these things.
So I think we’ve got to work on all these fronts, but to me, the first thing is making people aware of what coca is. Most people don’t know anything about it and if they do, they just think of it as the source of cocaine. So that’s where we’re starting.
Wade Davis: There was a big effort and a very hopeful effort to get the UN to reschedule coca. And this was done at the request of both the Bolivian and the Colombian governments. And the hope, as I mentioned, was that coca would be taken out of schedule. Andy mentioned its coke is in Schedule II in the United States, but by the international statutes of the UN, it’s still Schedule I. And the goal was to try to get it completely descheduled as a benign plant that it is.
The group that met in Vienna decided against that and to maintain the status quo to the disappointment of all advocates. And the rationale was a little strange. The reason that coca remained the equivalent of fentanyl is that cocaine could be extracted from coca. Well, everybody knows that. And the fact that nothing stopped the cartels extracting cocaine by the ton. So it made no sense that logic, but because of that, coca remains scheduled. And that was a big disappointment, but that effort continues.
Andrew Weil: But we are seeing movement in the US with, there’s been movement with cannabis, there’s been movement with psychedelics. A lot of this has been, I think, promoted by veterans demanding access to these treatments for mental health conditions, but things finally have loosened up. And maybe as part of that momentum, we can introduce discussions of coca and getting some movement there as well.
Tim Ferriss: I think it’s possible. My sort of pragmatic hat is always wondering, well, if we have many, many, many people listening to this podcast, there are probably policymakers. There are individuals, certainly, who say to themselves, “Hey, I would love to cut down on my coffee. Maybe give coca a spin. Sounds mild. Maybe doing a few days of that would be wonderful.” But I don’t know what, then, their next step is or how the demand or interest is harnessed in a way that leads to broader change. Do you have any thoughts on getting specific stakeholders to take any next steps?
Because chances are you have people from every possible walk listening to this. You likely have scientists who are perhaps psychedelic adjacent, maybe they are stimulant adjacent, who are interested. Of course, there’s a fundraising question, but that’s solvable, I think. I would be willing to help fund some research. What else can be done?
Andrew Weil: To the scientists I would say, this is an incredibly interesting plan with a fascinating history, cultural relevance, chemistry, pharmacological effects, and it hasn’t been studied. It’s just waiting there. This would be a rich subject for investigation. So I would think that scientists who are curious about things of this sort, medicinal plants, medical botany, natural products, would want to take a look at this.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll just say because it’s Schedule II versus Schedule I, it makes, presumably, the process for researching it much easier and much less expensive.
Wade Davis: But I would say, Tim, to the entrepreneurs who might be listening, the person who manages to crack this nut has the potential to make enormous wealth, because I think that the qualities of coca are such that they could very easily compete on the level that coffee is presented to the world. It’s just a much, much better natural stimulant, a more effective one, a more benign one, a more useful one. So when the dam breaks, it will be enormous. And again, you have issues of intellectual property, but again, this is a plant that’s been used for 8,000 years by everybody. It’s very difficult for anyone to claim the intellectual rights to this plant. And as some good friends of mine say, in this case, the plant itself has agency and the plant wants to be known to people.
And the other element of this is storytelling. I mean, Andy and I are in the midst of raising funds to make a film that will celebrate, in a positive sense, coca and the whole tradition. And it’s a story of social justice. It’s a story of spiritual illumination. It’s a story of Andean pre-history, incredible story of cultural celebration, ethnographic richness. And I think if people embraced the story, they would be deeply moved.
And at the same time, it’s also a story of incredible violation of human rights and the egregious way by which this plant has been demonized speaks to larger issues that we face as we try to find a way to live on this planet. And so, I think the story is so rich.
Andrew Weil: And Wade and I have been involved in an effort to rehabilitate coca for some time. In the 1970s, I started a not-for-profit foundation called the Beneficial Plant Research Association whose aim was to conduct research, make people aware of lesser known medicinal plants. And the main one we focused on was coca. We were way ahead of our time, but we had wonderful people involved in this effort.
And the group lapsed, but I revived it a couple of years ago and it’s now very robust. We have some really great scientists behind it. And I would urge listeners to check our website, which is bpra.org and read about the Coca Project and what we are involved with.
Tim Ferriss: bpra.org. Is that right?
Andrew Weil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If people were interested in potentially supporting the film, is that where they should go to contact folks?
Andrew Weil: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right. So, that’s one that people can latch onto.
Now, Wade, you were delivering a summons, a call to action to entrepreneurs. As luck would have it, we may have an entrepreneur in our midst. Known for True Food Kitchen, not only Matcha Kari. So Andrew, if you were going to market and you’re like, “You know what? Let me pave the way.” I’m not saying that’s your plan, but if you decided I want to be the first to introduce coca, right? Coca Kari?
Wade Davis: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: You could come up with, I’m sure that you could do a line extension. Fantastic matcha for people who are interested.
Andrew Weil: By the way, matcha and coca are both green powders. So, I’m an advocate of green powders. And matcha, this is another one that I got interested in way before its time and I tried for a number of years to introduce it here unsuccessfully. And now, I mean, it is just unbelievable. The worldwide demand for it has completely stressed Japan’s capacity to produce it. So, that took maybe 15, 20 years for me to get that going. Coca is probably going to take a little longer, but I am determined.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I mean, what would be the levers or perhaps dominoes is a better metaphor that you would want to tip over on the path to introducing coca as a commercial product?
Andrew Weil: Even just one good study clearly demonstrating one of these effects that we’ve talked about, of helping people get off much more dangerous stimulants or regulating carbohydrate metabolism, helping to prevent type 2 diabetes — Wade, what do you think?
Wade Davis: Well, I mean, I think that focusing on what Andy and I know from our personal experiences is how fantastic coca is, how it works. I think all of us, Tim, as conscious human beings, suffer from these afflictions that the Buddhists talk about, the monkey mind, these little moments of neuroses or even depression.
Tim Ferriss: I’m lucky if it’s moments. My god, I would pay to have moments.
Wade Davis: And I know. I’ll say something very personal. I mean, I have two daughters and both of them for different reasons have been on some of these serotonin uptake inhibitors, Prozac. And never Ritalin, but I’ve watched that. And what I experienced in my life, which is a very productive life, is that I function perfectly well without coca. Just like old Schultes used to say, he chewed coca every day in the Amazon, he didn’t chew it in Boston. I find that if I run out of coca, my life goes on. It’s just not as nice a life and it’s not as productive a life.
But what I find is that I’m as susceptible as anybody to mood swings, to existential despair, whatever we call it. I think this is part of the human condition. In the same way that death is the price we pay for the glory of being alive, I think some of these little mental fuck-ups are what we pay for the price of being conscious.
Tim Ferriss: The ticket of entry, yeah.
Wade Davis: And that’s the whole thing about coca is that it takes care of that. Without having any sense that you’ve been drugged or even stimulated, you just find that stuff flitting your way. And it just makes for a more productive life.
I’ve written 24 books, Tim. And I’ve made 50 films and people, “Oh, he’s so productive.” And I just smile like the Cheshire Cat. Of course I am. And Andy knows exactly how and why.
I think probably Andy and I both share a certain frustration that you can’t talk people into this. It’s sort of show, don’t tell. And it’s so subtle. I remember the first time I ever really got behind coca. It was in the Putumayo above Sibundoy in Colombia, and Tim and I had gotten a bunch of leaves in Silvia and Tim was never one to rush a situation that was itself inherently pleasant. And so we just laid back in the sun. And I’d been with the Mamos, but I hadn’t really discovered the plant. I mean, Andy will tell you, you create a learned experience with these plants. And suddenly, I just felt like I was just where I wanted to be.
And that’s what Andy says. When Andy, and I’ve quoted him many times, first went to the Kubeo in ’73, wasn’t it, Andy?
Andrew Weil: Yeah.
Wade Davis: And there’s a beautiful passage in one of Andy’s essays where he was exposed to mambe for the first time. Mambe, by the way, for the audience is just an Amazonian form of coca. It becomes a green powder like matcha and you don’t use it with an ad mix. The ad mixture as the ashes placed in the preparation so you end up swallowing the whole thing and you absorb the nutrients and so on.
But anyway, so Andy had been exposed to mambe and the next day with the men, they gather around this calabash and he walks away as I walked away in the Northwest Amazon with a spring to your feet, oblivious to the humidity. And as Andy said in that wonderful passage, “swinging my machete and feeling that I was just where I wanted to be.” And I think that’s a really great summation of the subjective effects of coca.
Andrew Weil: And can I say, I attribute at least some of my well-being to regular use of coca. By the way, today is my birthday.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, happy birthday.
Andrew Weil: And I am 84 and I feel pretty good.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you look great.
Andrew Weil: Yeah, people always comment on how good I look and so forth. And I have to say coca has contributed to that.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I have many more questions, but I’ll try to contain, I could probably use some more coca to get this ADHD-OCD under control.
But for people who have heard and maybe latched onto something you said earlier, which is one good scientific study, right? I’m a firm believer in this because I’ve been very active on trying to establish firsts, pilots that might be a proof of concept that then catalyze more research, et cetera. Are there any particular researchers who people could look to fund?
Andrew Weil: Yes. So, let me mention one who was on our board of beneficial plants and that’s Chris McCurdy, who is a medicinal pharmacologist at the University of Florida.
Tim Ferriss: How do you spell the last name?
Andrew Weil: M-C-C-U-R-D-Y, Christopher McCurdy. He’s University of Florida. And he is the main person who’s researched kratom and had a lot of federal support for his studies of kratom. And I met with him and got him interested in coca. And he was determined to do a study of this. Now, I will just tell you, it has been a very torturous route for him to get leaves legally to study, but he finally just this week got his supply. I mean, you would not believe the red tape.
Tim Ferriss: Why is it so hard?
Andrew Weil: Because this is the problem with coca, that it’s just all these regulations and fear about it and confusion with cocaine. Anyway, he’s a very interesting person to talk to. But he has set up, he’s just about to get going. And he’s doing animal research first, but he’s using whole coca, trying to disentangle the effects of the different alkaloids. But one of his interests is looking at this possibility of regulating carbohydrate metabolism. So, he’s the main person at the moment that I know who is doing research in this area and he’s very good.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I was wondering, I looked him up while we were talking, might not be a fit, might be a fit, but Dr. Peter Hendricks has done some interesting work mostly looking at — well, I shouldn’t say mostly, but perhaps best known for looking at the potential use of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy as a promising treatment for cocaine use disorder. So there might be room for looking at, as strange as it might sound to people, coca for cocaine use disorder. That might be too hard to sell.
Andrew Weil: I’ve proposed that in an article that I wrote long ago, saying that this would be one of the possible uses to wean people off of cocaine onto coca. That would be a big step up.
Tim Ferriss: I had not even thought about, and I feel foolish, realized that even if it’s Schedule II, if you are, say, using methylphenidate, aka ritalin or something else, you just synthesize the damn stuff. Whereas if you have to get actual organic coca leaves, that adds a whole different layer of headache in terms of procuring it, right? Because now you’re dealing with importation and this, that, and the other thing. Yeah, I hadn’t even thought about that wrinkle. There’s always a wrinkle.
Okay, got it. And for someone like Christopher McCurdy, how much do research studies like this cost? Do you have any ballpark for folks? In my experience, it’s like, okay, the number of subjects determines a lot of the cost.
Andrew Weil: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: So, if you want to power the study, if you want to try to get a properly powered study, maybe you want to increase the scope for more people to participate, et cetera. But do you have any idea? And I know you’re not speaking for him, but do you have any idea what something like that might cost?
Andrew Weil: More than you would think. So that is a challenge. But Chris has found that the federal government and National Institute on Drug Abuse is willing to fund these studies. So that’s very promising.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I had Nora Volkow of NIDA on the podcast a couple of years ago and it was a really good conversation. And I don’t know if this is public, might have to scratch it, but she was in the Oval Office for the executive order related to psychedelics. And I was like, “Man, that’s awesome.”
Andrew Weil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And she’s so brilliant. So I don’t know what her current status is within NIDA. She might still be running it, but there seems to be a seat change afoot. So, the timing could be very serendipitous to try to kick something off now, particularly on the research front.
For people who might be wondering, I’ll just throw out some numbers. I mean, early on, this is 2015, helping to fund some of the initial psilocybin studies looking at depression at Hopkins, for 50k, you could make a huge, huge, huge difference.
Andrew Weil: Really? That’s great.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not necessarily millions of people. It depends on, again, the size, the ambition. And you don’t want to be penny wise and pound foolish, right? If you can fund more and you want to drive the possibility for a statistically meaningful outcome that is suitable for publishing and defensible, then maybe you write a bigger check, right? Especially if you’re going to wait all that time, because science is pretty slow when it’s done properly.
Andrew Weil: Wade, can you tell us anything about what’s going on in Canada? Because the regulations in Canada are a little more favorable than they are in the US and there’s some research interests up there.
Wade Davis: There’s nothing really definitive. I mean, I think one opening in the States could be Bobby Kennedy. Bobby, few people know, but when his father was killed, was sent by the family to Colombia. And he fell in love with Colombia and I’ve been in Colombia with Bobby with the Mamos, chewing coca. He totally understands the plant and he certainly understands the distinction between coca and the alkaloid cocaine. So I think there’s an opening there which could be very promising.
Andrew Weil: And one area that I very much agree with him on is his initiative to change psychiatry and move it away from the biomedical model, which I think has been really failed us.
Wade Davis: I mean, I think this whole coca story, you slam up against the whole kind of failure of the War on Drugs and the ideology of the War on Drugs.
There’s a very funny account where in October, end of October 2020, there was this bust at the Philadelphia International Airport of 15 pounds of what was called green cocaine. And the customs agents sort of heralded this great sign of the vigilance of their colleagues and so on and anyone who knew anything about anything could see that that green cocaine was mambe and also in the bus was a brown paste, which everybody knew would’ve been a tobacco paste. Now, tobacco kills 400,000 people every year, but it’s legal. So this was not of concern to the agents, but the green cocaine was. And they analyzed it and discovered it had some cocaine in it, trivial amounts, so that if anyone had tried to just snort the mambe, they just would’ve plugged their nose most unpleasantly with a powder the consistency of talcum powder.
But the thing that was so disturbing about the bust is that after 60 years of War on Drugs, you had customs agents who still didn’t know the difference between coca and cocaine after expending a trillion dollars on this failed campaign. And that was really the equivalent, if you think about, of Eliot Ness busting a truckload of potatoes in violation of the Volstead Act. Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a good comparison. I like that.
Wade Davis: Or a peach. We don’t deny us the right to enjoy the luscious fruit of a peach because of the cardioactive glycosides found within the pit of every peach, right? Not to kind of push the metaphor, but they’re truly apples and oranges.
And so, I think when you combine that in-the-moment idiocy, together with the really pernicious history by which this plant has been demonized, I mean, Andy said earlier that these countries remain countries of conquered and conqueror. And in this era where we’re so sensitive to language, if people were aware of the language, and I wrote a long piece for Rolling Stone called the “Secret History of Coca,” the language being used by those who crafted the very documents that we live by to this day is so hideous that it would cause anybody to be immediately dismissed from any position in our country today. And yet that language, accusing coca users of being pornog — because they make this stuff up and it was all driven by the same guy, Anslinger, who created us, gave us Reefer Madness. And so we’re still living by that mindset, which has been utterly exposed as a racist and colonial conceit that it was.
Andrew Weil: And also, I think that coca is the most perfect example of how we’ve gone wrong in our relations with the natural world, really failing to see that plant for what it is, confusing it with this one component of it, and then getting ourselves in enormous amounts of trouble.
And in my career as a physician, I have worked for years and years to help people understand the differences between whole plants, natural products, and isolated compounds. I mean, I think isolated compounds have their place in medicine, but very often I see that these complex natural mixtures work better, are much safer, often have effects that we don’t have pure compounds that work for. And coca is a perfect example of that.
Wade Davis: And Andy, when you say that relation to the natural world, in a social sense, it’s expressed in Peru, as well. I mean, one of the great rituals I’ve participated in is called the mojonamiento. It’s out of Cusco where, once each year the fastest young boy in every hamlet is given the gift of becoming a woman, and you have to lead all able-bodied men on this ritual run, but it’s not your ordinary run. You start off at 11,500 feet, run down to the base of the sacred mountain, Antakillqa, to 9,000 feet. Then you run to over 16,000 feet and you fall across two soaring Indian ridges over the course of this 24-hour race that’s less a race than a ritual of ordeal. And the idea is that, as you enter this race, through pure exhaustion, you make the sacrifice that makes it sacred. It’s from the Latin.
And I did that race at the age of 48, the oldest man ever to do it and the only outsider to do it. And I only got through that race by chewing more coca in one day than anyone in the 8,000-year history of the plant.
But the point is what Andy’s saying about our relation with the natural world, what that race is really about is expressing a sense of obligation and belonging. You’re running the perimeter of the lands. There’s sacred mounds of earth, jitos, mahones, where the Wayllakama spin to bring the energy of the woman to the mountaintop where coca is given to Pachamama. And so the race becomes a ritual of belonging. You’re demonstrating your ownership, also your obligation to preserve that land.
So, you see, coca in that sense is as powerful and adjunct to culture as ayahuasca might be amongst the peoples of the Anaconda. You can’t do that run without coca, Tim. Coca is the mediator. They often say that the first to taste the leaves was Santísima María in the kind of syncretic myth of origins when she lost the Christ child. And in her grief, she sampled a leaf and that gave her the spirit to continue. Well, obviously that’s a syncretic fusion of pre-Columbian and Catholic ideas, but that’s an indicator of its centrality in the stream of existence in the Andes.
Tim Ferriss: So let me ask just a personal question of you guys, which I’m sure has occurred to a lot of listeners or viewers. And that is, why do you care so much about this? In the hierarchy of reasons, what’s at the top? What is it for you, Andy?
Andrew Weil: For me, it is the confusion of a plant with an element of it, which is I think a problem that I see in medicine greatly, that we just failed to understand those differences. And I would like to help educate more people about that. And as I said, I think coca is the most perfect example of how we’ve gone wrong in our relationship with a plant.
Tim Ferriss: And also just to, I suppose, underscore one thing, which is not what you’re saying. You were not saying that all plants are therefore safe, right?
Andrew Weil: No, obviously.
Tim Ferriss: That whole plants are therefore — you don’t want to go out and start chugging a bunch of hemlock tea, right? There’s plenty of stuff. However, piece versus whole, component versus entire plant are different.
Andrew Weil: Yeah, that’s a big one.
Tim Ferriss: They are just different.
Andrew Weil: And by the way, in our society particularly, I think there is great fear of nature and we tend to see nature as hostile. Many people I know think if you just go out and randomly munch plants in your backyard, you’ll likely die. The percentage of plants that can seriously harm you is pretty small. I mean, there aren’t many hemlocks out there. There’s a lot of things that don’t taste good. There’s a lot of things that might give you an upset stomach, but there’s not a lot of things that can kill you or cause serious harm.
I once had dinner with the chief technical advisor to one of the big European supplement companies and he was Austrian. He had traveled all over the world and he said that one thing that struck him was the extreme fear of nature in the English-speaking world. I mean, I’d never heard anyone say that, but he said this is an attitude that he found very common in the UK and Canada and Australia and the US, New Zealand. And he said, very different to what you see, for example, in German-speaking Europe, where people tend to regard nature as friendly, benign, helpful. And in German culture, there’s great use of medicinal plants in natural forms, very different from what we have here. So that’s just an interesting perspective. I’d never noticed that before.
Tim Ferriss: Where do you think that comes from? Any ideas?
Andrew Weil: I wonder. Wade, any suggestions?
Wade Davis: I mean, you certainly see it amongst fungalphobes as you always talk about, Andy, the fear of mushrooms.
Andrew Weil: Yeah.
Wade Davis: But Tim, back to your question, for me, I revere coca because of what it’s done for my life, but also it symbolizes for me everything I care about in terms of cultures as an anthropologist and everything I’ve ever fought for in terms of the rights of indigenous people. And it’s, to me, one of the most egregious violations of the rights of other cultures. And it’s also a denial of the genius of other cultures. So it symbolizes for me everything that I’ve stood up against in my career and it happens to be a plant that has brought benefits to me, enormous benefits. But I’ll give you, if I could share one anecdote that shows how crazy —
Tim Ferriss: Of course.
Wade Davis: — this all is. I don’t know if you remember, but some years ago Peru qualified for the first time in 10 years for the World Cup. And I saw the victory match on a screen in Cusco. It was played in Lima. And then the captain of the Peruvian team, who played for a squad in Sao Paulo, in a random drug test, was shown to have metabolites of cocaine in his urine and he was going to be kicked off the team. And this was going to make a huge international scandal.
And his lawyer called me from Sao Paulo and I said, “Well, wait a minute. Doesn’t he come from Lima?” “Yeah.” “Well, they just went through Christmas. Didn’t he go to Ayacucho or Cusco?” “Yeah.” “Oh, he must have stayed at the Monasterio Hotel in Cusco because that’s the nicest hotel.” “Yeah, that’s where he stayed.” Well, that hotel has huge vats of coca tea available at all times for its clientele for altitude sickness. And that’s what he had done. He had drunk copious amounts of coca tea and because of the idiocy of our understanding of the difference between the plant and the drug, this could have been an international incident because you well know that Peruvians, like all Latin Americans, take their football very seriously, but we got him off.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very seriously. Andy, it looks like you were going to say something. Do you have anything to add to that?
Andrew Weil: Nope. I think, for different reasons, we come from different places, we both are very passionate about this issue.
Wade Davis: Coca’s always seemed to be defined as what it is not. It’s not cocaine and presenting this plant in all of its glory — I mean, it’s interesting. I mean, Andy’s a real plant guy. He’s a real ethnobotanist, a real physician who’s always had plants in his practice. I went through a period of time where I was very much a botanical explorer, but I’m fundamentally a storyteller, a writer, an anthropologist, but this plant wrapped its arms around me when I was 19 years old and has never let me go. And I have a deep fidelity, it’s hard to explain. I don’t normally speak in this language, but this plant has given me so much and has allowed me to explore and have such extraordinary experiences in the field in pursuit of its mysteries and its wonder that I feel that liberating coca is the final act of my professional life. I feel that very sincerely.
And it also brings me back to Andy because Andy was like always my big brother. Andy and Tim Plowman, who were great friends, both acolytes of Schultes. And for me, I was able to come along as their kid brother. So the relationship with Andy, to me, is enormously important emotionally, spiritually even. And if Andy and I, in the memory of Tim, who tragically died way too young, at the age of 45, the great botanical authority on coca, he died of AIDS. And incidentally, as I was reading and doing his eulogy that I conceived the book One River, which is a biography of our great professor, Richard Evan Schultes, we’re doing this in part in memory of Tim. I’m sure Andy would agree.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground. What I’m going to do also to try to consolidate next steps for people, for anyone listening or watching, is I’ll create tim.blog/coca, so on my website —
Andrew Weil: That’d be great.
Tim Ferriss: That’ll lead to this episode and at the very top of the show notes, we’ll have a link to the bpra.org. We’ll have a link to some of the researchers who were mentioned, including any others that you guys might think of after the fact.
Wade Davis: It’d be wonderful. It’d be great —
Andrew Weil: We would most appreciate it.
Wade Davis: — to link to some of the pieces that Andy and I have written would be really great.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. We’ll put a bunch of stuff at the top with a bias for people who are listening. If they’re like, “This is all great. I don’t want to be purely a passive consumer of education or edutainment. I actually want to put a dent in the world,” then we’ll have that at the top because I don’t want to bury that stuff in terms of possible next actions for people. So folks, that’ll be at tim.blog/coca, C-O-C-A, just like Coca-Cola, not a coincidence by the way.
I’ll read you, this is a piece on Eater. People can look it up. Maybe I’ll link to it, actually. “An unassuming set of buildings in Maywood, New Jersey, less than 10 miles from Manhattan, holds a surprising secret: It’s what might arguably be called the cocaine capital of the United States. Here, a chemical company manufactures cocaine legally, with special permission from the US government, all in the service of a familiar company: Coca-Cola.” Cola, by the way, just for people who like little bits of trivia comes from kola, K-O-L-A. Well, in English, at least. African nut known for its caffeine content. So there you go.
Wade Davis: Right away, Tim, Coca-Cola notoriously had a secret coca plantation in Hawaii.
Andrew Weil: Hawaii, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: No kidding. Scoundrels. Look at that.
Andrew Weil: That is the only legal export of coca from Peru is to that chemical company, Stepan Chemical in Maywood, New Jersey. And the cocaine is extracted and sold for pharmaceutical use and the rest of the leaves are made into an extract, which is a secret flavoring ingredient in Coca-Cola.
Wade Davis: And in the 1961 UN convention on narcotic drugs, there was one specific exclusion of coca solely for that company.
Andrew Weil: And I got to go, in Peru, to where they were getting their leaves from, and they were trashy leaves. I mean, it was literally the sweepings on the floor. Stuff that Wade and I would not chew.
Tim Ferriss: Drinking sawdust. Botanical sawdust. Well, another bit of trivia for folks, if they care. 7 Up used to contain lithium citrates.
Andrew Weil: Oh, yes, right.
Tim Ferriss: Back in the day. Those old soda companies had some stuff figured out. Well, gentlemen, is there anything else, before we start to wind to a close, that you would like to add? Certainly, I would love you guys to mention where people can find you online, if you’d like them to go in any particular direction. And anything else that you would like to add. Andy?
Andrew Weil: My website is drweil.com, D-R-W-E-I-L.com. There’s a lot of health information there. And I am the founder of the Andrew Weil University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. We train physicians and health professionals, and that website is awcim.org and I’m very proud of our work there. We’ve graduated almost 3,000 physicians and other allied health professionals from our very intensive trainings, which include really good instruction on botanical medicine.
Tim Ferriss: I love it. And people can also find you on Instagram, X, et cetera, @drweil and presumably you don’t have a tap into the back of your brain for that. So I’m sure there’s nice, good publishing of valuable content coming out there so people can check that out. And then Wade?
Wade Davis: I just wanted to say, Tim, if I could just insert this in case you could use it, is that I’ve made a lot of reference to the egregious language by those who are responsible for the language of the UN Declaration, but maybe I could just read. The key figure was an acolyte of Anslinger, who was the notorious anti-drug warrior that we almost joke about with Reefer Madness. But this man’s name was Pablo Osvaldo Wolff, and he was the chief of the addiction producing drug section of the World Health Organization. He not only conceived, he wrote the language of coca demonization in that, but listen to what he says, and this is from a lecture to the Royal Society of Medicine in London, on the very eve of that commission led by Fonda going to Peru.
“The Indio who does not chew coca leaves is clear-sighted, intelligent, and lighthearted, willing to work, vigorous, and resistant to diseases; the coquero, on the contrary, is … apathetic, lazy, insensitive to his environment; his mind is befogged; his emotional reactions are rare and violent, he is morally and intellectually anesthetized, social subdued, almost a slave. Moral degeneration accompanies the physical; lying is one of the outstanding characteristics, probably due to lack of moral equilibrium. Criminality is high, and barbaric forms of homicide can only be explained by a certain moral insensibility.
“We are convinced that coca-leaf chewing is a social evil; the chronic consumption of these leaves constitutes a social poison which undermines the physical and mental health of the population. … The children of coqueros are markedly deficient in intelligence.…There is no doubt that the habit of chewing coca leaves is one of the most powerful reasons for the backwardness and misery of the Indian population … the last link in a chain of social and medico-social scourges, which include pauperism, bad housing conditions, deficient nutrition, rudimentary or completely absent education, alcoholism, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and other infections, and promiscuity, to mention only the worst calamities and miseries.”
Andrew Weil: I never heard that, Wade. I never heard that.
Tim Ferriss: That’s quite a list of offenses.
Wade Davis: This is quoted in my Rolling Stone piece, Andy. You just can’t believe the language. “The remedy of the moment is gradual disintoxication of the native, diminishing the production as well as the consumption of coca by means of a suitable education; by abolishing the superstition of the magic action and the well-being of leaves; by prohibiting initiation of young…” Goes on and on.
“Only with skill and patience can coca addiction be abolished, but it can be done.… Christianized Indians no longer live in the former wretched conditions and thus show themselves physically and mentally capable of freeing themselves from coca-leaf chewing and addiction.” And you have to think, this is the man who wrote the statutes that we turn to today in the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This is the language that the UN World Health Organization has recently affirmed by refusing to deschedule or reschedule coca.
Tim Ferriss: It might be time for an update.
Wade Davis: I mean, it’s that bad. Now, can you think of any other policy that we would live by today? It’s like policies have been written by, I don’t know, Hermann Goring or Goebbels dictating religious policies today in the United States of America and yet this is what we are trying to deal with and confront and it is so dark and so evil.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it sounds like A, terrible. B, time for an update. C, I’m sure a lot of the people who are adjacently or indirectly affirming this have no idea what it actually says. They have not read what you just read aloud. So worth another look, like a lot of things. And not saying it’s panacea, not saying that there shouldn’t be guide rails or guardrails, but that it’s worth another look.
And I do think the wedge in the door, to pull from language earlier, probably is A, awareness of the benefits. And I think you guys do a pretty damn fine job of showcasing the longitudinal productivity gains of moderate, sustained use and separately getting some science funded. And I think those are parallel tracks and the film itself being used as an educational tool to support the, I would say both of those, right? The later and the scientific exploration.
Because it strikes me, I mean, look, I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on the internet, nor am I a scientist, but I like to spend time with a lot of scientists. I think about some of the effects of coca and the appetite suppression, but the physical vigor in the absence of food. And I wonder, man, I would love to just take blood ketone measurements of these people.
Andrew Weil: Simple stuff, simple stuff.
Tim Ferriss: So simple, so, so straightforward. Well, guys, this has been wonderful. Any last closing comments, concerns, complaints?
Andrew Weil: Thank you for providing a forum to talk about this.
Tim Ferriss: My pleasure.
Wade Davis: I would like to add, Andy, just one comment on what Tim just said and what you responded, how easy these experiments could have been done. I think we have to remember that it’s not an accident that they weren’t done. In other words, the nutritional study that you and Tim did in the 1970s could have been done in the 1920s.
It wasn’t done because people did not want anything that would affirm the possibility that the plant was anything but the demonic entity that they claimed it to be. So it’s important in all of this to remember, this wasn’t just an accident of history or casual neglect. This was a conscious attempt to demonize and eradicate a plant and not for pharmacological reasons, not for medical reasons, not for social reasons, for cultural and political and reasons of power.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I wouldn’t want to, by association, make policy makers feel like they need to carry the burden of what was truly a travesty, if they are, in part, those whose help we would like. But understanding the history is important. I mean, we’ll link to the Rolling Stone piece and also, Andy, anything else that you would like linked for people who want to check it out at tim.blog/coca. I mean, coca has been of incredible interest to me for decades now. It is of such cultural importance. It is of ecological importance.
Wade Davis: Economic importance.
Tim Ferriss: Economic importance. If you care about conservation, if you care about indigenous land rights, if you care about health and performance, period. Let’s say you don’t give a damn about what happens in South America, but you just say, “Wow, I feel like pounded dogshit after three cups of coffee and then I can’t sleep at night and then I’m dependent and I have a headache when I try to stop.” It’s worth digging a little deeper and educating yourself on coca.
It may not be available tomorrow, may not be available next year, but it is deeply, deeply interesting and endlessly fascinating as a possible subject of or focus of experiments. So I will leave it at that for now. We can always, and I’m sure we’ll be chatting more via text, but thank you guys very much. Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you, Wade, that people can find you at daviswade.com. Is that right?
Wade Davis: Yep, that’s my website.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the main place. Anywhere else you would like to point people? We’ve got Wade Davis official on Instagram, X, @authorwadedavis.
Wade Davis: I think people would be intrigued by the book One River, which is really an account of Tim and I and coca and Schultes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great book. It is a great book.
Wade Davis: That book, in particular, would open people’s eyes.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Perfect. All right. Check out One River, folks. Everybody —
Andrew Weil: And again, we’re grateful for your support.
Wade Davis: Very much so.
Andrew Weil: I think it can make a big difference.
Tim Ferriss: My pleasure.
Wade Davis: Thanks so much, Tim.
Andrew Weil: Very grateful.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I love — this is important stuff and it’s also, while I have this, before AI gobbles every podcast, I would like to surface subjects that are of importance that have not yet been reputationally de-risked, right? I don’t have to report to any corporate overlord who can fire me or throttle my sponsors or whatever it might be. So I have the incredible accidental luxury of being able to, and joy, of being able to have these conversations with folks like the two of you who are bringing in decades of expertise and research.
So always appreciate the time. Always nice to see you both. And for people listening, as always, show notes. Check it out, tim.blog/coca, C-O-C-A. We’ll go straight to this episode and give you more information on where you can learn more. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than as necessary to others and to yourself. Compassion, oh, yeah, that applies to yourself too. Don’t forget that. And as always, thanks for tuning in.
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