The “Divine Leaf” with 8,000+ Years of Use — Exploring th...
Tim Ferriss·2026-06-26·via The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
“Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka”
— Wade Davis with Dr. Andrew Weil on the health benefits, sacred history, and unjust prohibition of the most misunderstood plant on Earth
Dr. Andrew Weil (@DrWeil) is a pioneer in integrative medicine and founder of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he holds the Lovell-Jones Endowed Chair and serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health.
Wade Davis (@wadedavisofficial) is an ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. From 2014 to 2024 he served as Professor of Anthropology and BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia, and from 2000 to 2013 as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.
Connect with the Beneficial Plant Research Association (BPRA):
[00:02:38] When coca tea cured my brutal altitude sickness in Chile.
[00:04:01] Andy meets coca, 1965: the Andes’ master medicine for gut, energy, mood, metabolism.
[00:06:20] 14 alkaloids, one scapegoat.
[00:07:11] The paradox: one remedy for both diarrhea and constipation.
[00:11:37] 8,000 years, zero addiction — and the 1975 study no one wanted to run.
[00:13:11] Eradication began 60 years before there was a cocaine problem.
[00:16:27] Two nations inside Peru: alcohol versus coca.
[00:17:05] The 1950 UN commission that dictated coca policy by pseudoscience, fear, and racism.
[00:18:10] Filed beside fentanyl and heroin; 250,000 families and the price of peace.
[00:20:03] What coca actually feels like: milder than half a coffee, no crash, no withdrawal.
[00:24:19] Decoupling the leaf from the cartels; why crop substitution is a fantasy.
[00:25:54] Domesticated three times; the accident of Schedule II.
[00:27:49] The sacred leaf: k’intu, cruceta, Pachamama, runakuna.
[00:31:11] Hayo in the Sierra Nevada, and Latin America’s most-denied gift.
[00:32:53] The wedge in the door: demand, the FDA, and an entrepreneur’s gold mine.
[00:40:22] The story coca deserves — a film, green powders, and one good study.
[00:43:12] Monkey mind, the tax of consciousness, and an 84th birthday on coca.
[00:47:35] Who to fund: McCurdy and the hunt for legal leaves.
[00:49:17] Could coca treat cocaine addiction? Cost, and NIDA’s timing.
[00:53:18] “Green cocaine” at the airport: coca is to cocaine as potatoes are to vodka.
[00:56:58] A 24-hour ritual run powered entirely by coca.
[00:59:07] Why two men gave their careers to one leaf — and the pharmaceutical body count.
[01:06:22] America’s legal cocaine capital, and Coke’s secret recipe.
[01:09:08] No accident: the hideous prose behind laws we still obey.
[01:15:42] Parting thoughts.
Quotes from the Interview
“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.”
— Wade Davis
“[Coca is] as important to that [Indigenous Andes] population as peppermint and chamomile are in European medicine. It’s their major medicinal plant.”
— Andrew Weil
“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.”
— Wade Davis
“In coca, there are 14 alkaloids. Cocaine is one of them. 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.”
— Andrew Weil
“Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka.”
— Wade Davis
“As the anthropologist Catherine Allen said, 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.”
— Wade Davis
“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.”
— Andrew Weil
“I feel that liberating coca is the final act of my professional life. I feel that very sincerely.”
— Wade Davis
Want to hear another episode that untangles the curse from the blessing of coca?Listen to this one with ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin about the 8,000-year history of the coca leaf, the varieties of coca and their uses, coca-leaf bonding among the Kogis of Northern Colombia, surviving altitude sickness in the Andes, the adventures of Richard Evans Schultes, ayahuasca and shamanic knowledge, the biocultural conservation of the rainforest, and much more.
