Why is cocaine bad for you, but raw, natural coca leaf is not?
In: Chemistry
Its like 80%+ alcohol – A glass of wine doesnt really hurt you much, but a glass of concentrated, refined, liquor will send you to the floor. IDK exactly the numbers – but lets say it takes 1kg of coca plants + a hell of a lot of chemicals (gasoline, acids, solvents etc) to get 1g out of it. Or you can chew one kg of coca plant – that will take quite some time…
So its the same like having a shot instead of a beer – same content (all though mentioned chemicals) but totally different dose. That classic “coke taste” is not coke… its the things being cut with, lactose, caffeine and so on in powder form. Coke in itself doesnt taste much at all.
Because the dose makes the poison.
50 mg of caffeine will make you feel energetic and focused. 15.0 g of caffeine will probably kill you, and will almost definitely hurt you badly.
This one is a pretty easy “dose makes the poison”.
Even if we assume the processed cocaine is 100% pure, without additives or being cut, gram for gram, the active compounds will be much, much stronger.
Chew a coco leaf weighing 5 grams? Small dose.
Snort 5 grams of cocaine? I hope you’ve sorted out your bucket list.
If you’re interested, most substances on this planet have what’s known as an LD50. It’s the dose for an average person to have a 50/50 chance of killing them, usually expressed in measurement/kg of body weight.
Great visual table on acute and chronic LD50, and some explanations as well:
https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/05/07/measures-of-toxicity/
Coca leaves have an average of 0.8% cocaine alkaloids. Cocaine on the street is 40-80%. And the rest of it is fillers that are bad for you.
Generally the more pure a drug is, the more powerful it’s effect is. Your body considers these effects a problem and act to balance it out, often meaning you can no longer function without the drug.
The truth is that *everything* is bad for you in high enough doses.
Too much oxygen can kill you. Too many vitamins can kill you. Even too much protein can kill you.
The process of turning coca leaves into cocaine basically involves taking a particular part of a whole lot of leaves, and concentrating it into as pure a form as can be reasonably obtained. It takes pounds of leaves to make a gram of cocaine.
Imagine eating a pound of coca leaves every day.
Went to college with a girl from Peru. Her village was at the base of a tall mountain popular with scientists, they had weather equipment at the top. Periodically Americans would arrive and hire locals to help them hike up to replace batteries or whatever. They usually refused the coca leaves the locals offered them, and paid the price on the hike up. The scientists who chewed the leaves did much better.
A standard shot and a standard beer have the same amount of alcohol. That’s the point of standardizing them.
Man they use gasoline and or diesel in extracting the drug from the leaves. That and whatever some psycho cuts into the mix. My 2 biggest problems other than the legality of it all.
As with every chemical compound, It’s all about the dose. Apples contain trace arsenic, and bananas are weakly radioactive. But both of these are fine since the amount is so low. In coca leaves, the amount of cocaine is fairly low. As other posters have said, it takes an massive amount of leaves to extract out significant amounts of pure cocaine. Eating a few leaves will give you a small amount of cocaine, and you’ll probably feel a bit more energetic, but it’s not remotely close to the amount you would invest from snorting a line of pure cocaine.
Something else key here is the rate of absorption. Things that are inhaled or injected are absorbed into the bloodstream and get into the brain much faster and without as much breakdown as other routes of administration like oral (which can get broken down by enzymes in the saliva, stomach, and other parts of the digestive system and then may also still has to travel through tissue) or transdermal (which is very slow). This is why what we think of as “the most addictive” drugs or “drugs of abuse” are smoked (inhaled) or injected. It’s all about the speed at which the drug can get into the brain.
Large quantities of drug getting in the brain fast will activate reward and other “addiction” pathways. Large quantities of drug getting into the brain slowly doesn’t really do that.
Latest Answers