I’ve always heard that South American natives often chew a wad of coca leaves to give them greater endurance at physical tasks. I’ve also heard that in some localities coca leaf tea is a legal and popular beverage. What’s the straight dope on all this? Do the natives and other users of these products experience the same devastation that addicts in other countries do? Do they become addicted, but with less impact because the drug, at least in unrefined form, is easier to get? Is the addictiveness of the tea like that of regular tea or coffee, or is it something more intense?
Indigenous Andean people have chewed coca leaves (generally in the form of a tightly rolled cigar-shaped bunch of fresh leaves known as a quid for thousands of years. The cocaine in the leaves is a moderate stimulant, due to the fact that is absorbed sublingually via the oral mucosa in much smaller quantities than when absorbed through the mucous membranes in the nose. It indeed prevents fatigue, lessens appetite, and generally helps people cope with working for extended periods of time in oxygen in very high altitudes. Traditional use does not produce a pronounced euphoria. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the (IIRC) Pure Food and Drug Act many patent medicines (sold as Nerve Tonics, etc) had cocaine as their active ingredient, in higher quantities than was used in traditional use.
The epidemic of cocaine abuse was first seen, however, in the 20th century, with the illicit use of pure cocaine absorbed via insuffulation. Furthermore, the mixture of cocaine with an inert powder (eg baking soda) to create a smokable form (crack cocaine) created an even greater drug problem.
The method of ingestion seems to be correlated with the duration of effect, intensity of effect, as well as physical effects. While traditional use is probably not beneficial to the user in the long run (neither is coffee or soda for that matter) the physical effects are nowhere near as pronounced as that of a powder cocaine or crack cocaine user.
In a lot of cases, eating (or drinking or smoking) a plant has different effects from consuming the purified active ingredient. Drinking coffee or guarana gives me a very different effect than taking caffeine pills. The same goes for eating ephedra rather than pure ephedrine. I’ve never taken Marinol (pure pharmaceutical THC), but people who have say that it’s not the same as smoking pot. I assume that these differences are due to other active ingredients besides the main one that are present in the plants in smaller amounts. If you read the labels on some bottles of ephedra, for example, they don’t tell you how much ephedrine is in each pill. Instead they say, “ephedrine group alkaloids.”