Episode Transcript
[Intro]: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:22] Dennis McKenna: Today, it's my great pleasure to invite two of my esteemed friends and colleagues to the Brainforest Café, Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Wade Davis. Both of these men hardly need an elaborate or lengthy introduction. They're well known for their accomplishments in the fields of natural and integrative medicine, in Andy's case, and in anthropology and ethnobotany, among other disciplines, in Wade's case. Their work will be familiar to most listeners of this podcast, and more complete biographies are posted on the podcast session site. I urge our listeners to examine them for a more complete appreciation of the tremendous contributions these men have made in their respective fields.
For today's Brainforest Café discussion, our focus will be on the topic of the coca plant, one of the most beneficial and one of the most misunderstood plants in the world. Andy and Wade have long had an interest in investigating the many potential applications of Coca and in educating scientists, policy experts, and the general public about the social, medical, and geopolitical complexities of this plant. Their mutual interest in it can be traced to their early associations with Dr. Richard E. Schultes, the legendary ethnobotanist who was the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum for many decades. Both were students of Schultes in the 70s and 80s, and both were also friends and colleagues of Timothy Plowman, also a fellow student of Schultes at the time, who became, prior to his untimely death in 1989, the recognized scientific authority on the botany, taxonomy, and evolution of coca. Our coca summit in Peru is dedicated to Tim's memory. United by this mutual interest, all three of these men became important public figures advocating for the recognition of coca's virtues, for the necessity for regulatory policy reform that may permit coca's many gifts to be shared with the world.
Gentlemen, welcome to the Brainforest Café.
[00:02:51] Wade Davis: Hi.
[00:02:53] Dennis McKenna: So honored and happy to have you here. I think this is a historic occasion. For numerous reasons, we don't get. It's not every day that we get Andy Weil and Wade Davis together on the same podcast, even though you know each other so well. As I said, I just feel that Tim is present in, you know, in spirit. I mean, he was really a mentor to both of you. You both traveled with him, and he was more.
I believe you did, Andy. I know that Wade traveled with him a lot.
[00:03:33] Andy Weil: Yes, I did.
[00:03:34] Dennis McKenna: And he was sort of, you know, a mentor in that sense to both of you, and.
[00:03:42] Wade Davis: Well, I might correct you a little bit there, Dennis. You know, I was, Tim was a mentor to me, but Andy was a mentor to me. These were two colleagues who were, in their own way, pursuing this sacred plant in the field at the same time. And they were, to me, kind of my two older brothers. So I was along as a kind of young field assistant with Tim, but at the same time, Andy was hotly on the pursuit of the plant. And what made their research so fascinating is how complementary it was.
Tim pursuing the ethnobotany, the taxonomy, the phylogeny, and then Andrew with his background in medicinal botany, and of course, having graduated from Harvard Medical School in time on this extraordinary odyssey, studying altered states of consciousness around the world. And he became fascinated, as Tim was in coca. So it's more like they were two brothers coming together from different aspects, pursuing the wonder of this plant. And they both were powerful advocates of the leaf. And in fact, together they formed a company, the Beneficial Plants Research association, that in the 1970s, began to attempt to liberate the plant and make its benefits available to all people. So Andy wrote about coca virtually as much as Tim did, and they were the two great figures in my life. And I, in fact, met Andy when he just came back from his travels in the kitchen at the flat that Tim and I shared in in Cambridge in 1975.
[00:05:30] Andy Weil: Dennis I entered Harvard as a freshman in 1960 and took Dick Schultes course in Plants and Human affairs. And he was my thesis advisor. I wrote an undergraduate thesis under him, then went to Medical School in 1964. In 1965, after my first year of medical school, Dick Schultes sent me to South America on a plant collecting trip. And just before I left, he said, I want you to be sure to chew coca when you're down there, and it's a very interesting plan and you should get to know it. So I did, first in Peru and then in Bolivia, and I was fascinated by it. And so I was there before Tim entered as a student and before Wade entered as a student. And then I was on the research faculty of the Harvard Botanical Museum for many years. And in that position I conducted studies of coca. I was first interested in learning about the different varieties of coca, but I was always fascinated by the medicinal uses among the indigenous population of the Andes. It is the most important medicinal plant. And I was holding the position of something like peppermint or chamomile in European traditional medicine.
Listened to what these people had to say about all of the wonderful effects of coca, and then I was astonished that there was so little modern research on it. For a plant that is of such enormous historical, cultural, scientific, medicinal, botanical importance, it has been so little studied and little paid attention to, and that struck me as strange. And then the whole governmental policy issue, which Wade and I have been quite involved with, is, I think, one of the most striking examples of how we have gone wrong in our relationships with plant medicines.
[00:07:23] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:07:24] Wade Davis: You know, one of the most wonderful descriptions of the subtle effects of coca. And it's a very difficult thing to convey to people because, of course, coca is not cocaine any more than potatoes or vodka. But to get people to understand that we're talking about a totally different substance here that has these incredibly subtle effects. So subtle you can almost not sense them unless you pay attention. And yet it's more like you. The measure of the plant is how it affects your life. Your ability to focus, your contentment, your ability to concentrate. It's a very difficult thing to put into words. And Andy put it into words better than I think anyone that I've ever read when he gave his account of taking mambe for the first time with the kubeo.
And I won't steal Andy's thunder, but he took the plant the night before and appreciated its subtle effects. But it was all in the morning when he, with the men, took a wad of mambe, which is the Amazonian form of coca, a powder.
And he had the wonderful line that he walked along swinging his machete, absolutely content to be exactly where he was, doing exactly what he was doing in that moment of time. And that captures the extraordinary magic of this plant and the fact that it does allow you to focus and concentrate. We keep keeping the conversation in terms of the negative. Coca is not cocaine. But missing from that is the fact that coca is the most beneficial plant that is underutilized by humanity. It's a plant that is the greatest gift of Latin America to civilization. It's a plant that has been debased and demeaned and insulted for generations.
[00:09:14] Dennis McKenna: I think you're preaching to the converted here, Wade. I totally agree. I mean, it is a remarkable plant. I don't know. I know the story you're talking about. His paper in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology is a seminal paper, even though it was published in 1981. Many of the applications that he talks about. This is a beautiful paper, and it's going to be posted on the podcast website. People can download it, but it really succinctly summarizes the many, many benefits of coca, and it is a very important plant.
[00:09:55] Wade Davis: Andy can jump in about the benefits from a medical point of view, but one thing I just wanted to mention is that by complete chance, I've been going through all of Tim's coca files that he bequeathed me after he passed.
And one of the things that strikes me, Andy, is that we all knew that in the 30s, in the 20s, there was this kind of cabal to demean the plant, from physicians who looked up into the Andes and saw social pathologies, and because they couldn't deal with issues of economics and justice, they demonize the plant. But what really struck me in looking through Tim's files was to realize that that kind of characterization of the plant didn't just stop in the 30s and the 20s. It continued deep into the 1970s and even 80s when you guys were doing your research.
And at the same time, the voice of reason that was calling for a rethink about all of this was as vocal during all those years, reaching a certain crescendo with you and Tim in the 70s. And yet here we are, 45, 50 years later, and we're still coming together in Cusco to try to find a way to move forward the dial towards the liberation of the plant. And we're still dealing with the same challenges we still have not been able to break through. And I'd be fascinated to have your perspective on just what has kept us from being able to make that breakthrough that could actually lead to the liberation of the plant.
[00:11:29] Andy Weil: Well, first of all, Wade, when I went to live with the Kubeos, this was in the 1970s, there had been very little written about the use of Amazonian coca. Most of the observations were made in the Andes, and there was a conflation of the living conditions of the Andes and all of the social problems there, malnutrition, harsh climate and so forth with effects of coca. And it was very interesting to see in the Amazonian population, where people were well fed and didn't have those climatic challenges, that you didn't see any of that social pathology associated with the leaf. That was the first observation I made. And then a major focus of my work in integrative medicine is to teach both health practitioners and patients about the differences between complex natural products and compounds isolated from them and made available in purified form. And I think there are many advantages to using complex natural drugs. I don't reject the medications we have. I think they have their place. But often these complex mixtures of compounds are safer and have better effects than isolated compounds. And coca and cocaine are one of the most dramatic examples of this, you know, you've said, many people said coca is not cocaine, but this is a really, really important point.
[00:12:53] Dennis McKenna: Right, from reading your paper, Andy, it's like coca is almost. Appears to be almost the perfect tonic, what they sometimes call an adaptogen in the herbal business. I mean, it's a balancer, is what it is.
[00:13:08] Andy Weil: And, Dennis, one of the observations that I made, actually, since that paper, that I think is very important, you know, I mentioned there that among Andean Indians, coca is the most important GI remedy. And those people say that it treats both diarrhea and constipation. That makes no sense from a pharmacological point of view. Cocaine is a gut stimulant, and gut stimulants, you know, increase gut motility. So it, yes, great for constipation, but what's it going to do for diarrhea except make it worse? But when you look at the structural formula cocaine, it's an odd molecule because it looks like it falls into the group of tropane alkaloids like scopolamine and atropine, which are gut paralytic. So if you just looked at the molecule, you would predict that it's gut paralytic. The other alkaloids in coca also have that general structure, but probably some of them are gut stimulants, some of them are gut paralytics. And the question is, what happens when you put that ambivalent mixture into the body? And I think the body decides what it wants to use. And that's not attributing any mystical intelligence to the body. It may have to do with which receptors are available for binding at the time. And I see this pattern in many medicinal plants, that there are complex mixtures of both agonists and antagonists, things that push and things that pull against physiology. And I think when you give those kinds of mixtures to the body, you let the body participate in the therapeutic equation. When you give a purified compound, it's a unidirectional shove in one direction that may have its place. But I think that there is often a superior effect of having the body decide what to use. And I think coca and cocaine are a perfect example of that.
[00:14:59] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, exactly. This is a perfect example of symbiosis. I mean, the pure compounds, as you say, they have their place, but what is taken away is the body's ability to take what it needs.
[00:15:13] Andy Weil: Exactly.
[00:15:14] Dennis McKenna: It works with. So it's a true symbiosis.
[00:15:17] Andy Weil: Exactly.
[00:15:17] Dennis McKenna: Jim Duke used to say the reason these Herbal medicines work is because the body intuitively or by its constitution will take out from that complex mixture what is necessary for the rebalancing. And coca seems like the perfect example of that. I do hope that our conference has an impact because the world needs this.
I need it. After reading your paper, I realized I need this stuff. I'm just at the part of the place in my life where I could benefit from all of these benefits that you outline in this paper. I mean, I'm an old man.
I want to. I want to be a healthy old man. And this could very much help.
[00:16:05] Wade Davis: Well, I think. I mean, I think that's the thing that is so unfortunate, is not this ongoing debate about the war on drugs, as much as that this plant has so many benefits. And, you know, properly grown and developed, you're talking about an export commodity that could rival coffee. And as a natural stimulant, it is infinitely more useful, infinitely more beneficial to the body than coffee. And so you're actually talking about a gift to the world that could allow a country like Colombia, through tax revenue, to secure the funds necessary to pay the cost of peace, having drained its treasury for 50 years to fund a war that wouldn't have lasted a day without the sordid profits, Prohibition. So there's an issue of justice here as well.
But, Andy, I wanted to ask you, after all your experience with coca and all of your efforts going back to the 60s, and especially with the creation of the Beneficial Plants Research association in the 70s, what do we need to do to move the dial?
[00:17:13] Andy Weil: I think, first of all, education, all important, that is, teaching people the difference between cocaine and coca. Secondly, to make people aware of these benefits and then to create a demand for whole coca products in North America. Because I think that would open a market demand that would drive change. You know, the producing companies would love to be able to export coca legally and make it available, but. And also it's a matter of educating physicians about these uses, because most doctors have no awareness at all about coca or its potential benefits. I think if we could get a demand going here, a market demand, and then an educated medical profession, that would begin to change things.
[00:17:58] Wade Davis: But how do we get around the chicken and egg problem of the fact that you can't begin to do the studies that are necessary, let alone create that constituency for the plant, given the legal status of the leaves? I mean, I only.
[00:18:12] Andy Weil: Yeah, as you know, Wade, though, coke is a Schedule 2 substance, which should theoretically make it much easier to work with than a Schedule 1 substance. You know, it means it's technically available for medical use. Now. It is absolutely.
It's unthinkable that researchers can't get supplies of coca to work with. But as you know, one of the main people trying to study the leaf at the University of Florida, I think, has tried now for over a year to get supplies of coca legally and has not been able to because of bureaucratic red tape. That has got to change, possibly with the new administration we have coming in. Wade, you might comment on this, that, you know, we. There'll be a change at the FDA and, you know, maybe that will favor, you know, making. Easing up this restrictive legislation.
[00:19:00] Wade Davis: Well, I mean, I think that, you know, Bobby Kennedy has taken a lot of heat because of his stand or his perceived stand on vaccines. But he's a very good friend of mine. We go back a long time and he's. He's a good man and he's an authentic man. And his real focus is not about vaccines, pro or con, but rather the health of America, which is indisputably not good. And he's going after obesity, exercise, preventative medicine. And he also is very aware as an ex addict as to the consequences of drug use, but he also understands the folly of drug policy.
And, you know, I've been with Bobby in Colombia, where his family actually sent him in the wake of his father's death. And he not only loves Colombia, he understands the traditional use of the leaves. So I'm hoping that this might be the kind of positive opening that he could affect should he be confirmed. But beyond that, there's a real question we have to ask. Where does this opposition come from? And I remember Andy, when I came back from Colombia after I'd been with Tim, Tim told me there was a job available at DEA that he wanted me to apply for. But then he said if I took the job, he'd kill me. And. And I went out to the DEA and found this corporate, corporate kind of fat official who clearly wasn't an AG agent. He was DEA head to toe. And the job offer was for me to go back. All they had concluded from Tim's research was, was that we were good at finding coca fields. So they wanted me to go back, enter those fields, and collect all the pests that predated on coca, from fungi to insects, and bring them back so they could be manipulated and reintroduced.
And as I was looking at this guy, I kept thinking, where do I know you from? I was certain that I had met before, but we hadn't met before, but we had met a thousand times in Medellin when I lived there, just as the cartel got going, and we knew some of the cartel guys, they were just all around the city. And even though we didn't know how sordid the war would become and how awful the drug trade would end up being, the character of these individuals was clear from the start. And when I walked out of the office at the usda, I realized that I hadn't met the fellow, but I'd met him a thousand times. And he was the same energy, in a sense, as the.
The members of the cartel. It struck me there were kind of two sides of the same coin, both deeply invested in a war on drugs that brings an annual budget of somewhat $60 billion to the DEA or to drug policy and war on drugs in general, and of course, brings countless billions to the cartels. And neither side had any interest in ending, let alone winning, the war on drugs. And it seems to me that's the real impediment.
[00:22:06] Dennis McKenna: That's exactly right. These different. The governments and the cartels are basically in cahoots. It's not in the interests of either one to see cocaine legalized, because that would collapse the market. And that seems to me to be the difficult thing. Without legalization, how can you develop all these alternatives? Non co.
[00:22:31] Wade Davis: I can agree that without some kind of cleansing stroke of legalization on cocaine, Colombia will never have stability because there's more cocaine being produced than ever before. But we're not talking here about cocaine. We're talking about liberating and distinguishing the planet.
[00:22:44] Andy Weil: Wade when I first went to Peru in 1965, I worked with the Impresa Nacional de la Coca. They took me around to the coca fields and so forth. It was so obvious to me that Peru was two nations that have always been at war with each other since the Spanish conquest. There is the indigenous population with its capital in the high altitude that uses coca as its main recreational stimulant. And there's the European population, based in Lima, that drinks alcohol. And these have been at war with each other ever since. At one point, the Peruvian government had the World Health Organization come in and administer Stanford, Binet and Wechsler intelligence scales to Andean Indians and concluded that coca caused mental deterioration in that population and therefore it should be eradicated because it was holding back national development. And it's that mentality, I think, that we're up against, that these two civilizations clashing with each other that look at the world in very different ways.
[00:23:51] Wade Davis: Well, that's certainly what happened In Peru in the early days, I mean, one of the most extraordinary thing is you had all this literature saying that coca was responsible for every problem in the Andes. And yet in all of those years, none of these public health officials, let alone the physicians, did the obvious. A nutritional assay of a plant that was consumed every day by 6 million people.
And when you and Tim and Jim Duke did those studies, finally in the 1970s, what you actually discovered about the plant, in a sense, horrified your backers at the U.S. department of Agriculture. Can you just tell us a little bit about the results of that study?
[00:24:32] Andy Weil: Yeah, it showed that coca had significant content of nutrients, of vitamins and minerals, and was probably essential in the Andean diet. The other thing that I observed that, that I pointed out in that 1981 paper, is that coca appears to have a extraordinary effect on metabolism, on carbohydrate metabolism. You know, the Andean population has a very high incidence of the genes for type 2 diabetes, but they don't express themselves in that population. If people are consuming coca, along with their high carbohydrates diet and getting a lot of physical exercise, if those people move to lower altitude, stop using coca and begin eating more of typical city diets, those genes express themselves. So I think there's tremendous potential for looking at coca as a potential treatment for or preventive of type 2 diabetes, which is an enormous problem in our population.
[00:25:33] Wade Davis: So not just in Peru, but all around the world.
[00:25:36] Andy Weil: All around the world.
[00:25:37] Dennis McKenna: Well, that's amazing. I mean, the geopolitical issues are so complex. This is what's dismaying.
Coca is clearly a beneficial plant. We need to. Hopefully this conference will make a difference in some way. It will get the right people to notice, and potentially something can be done.
[00:26:00] Andy Weil: Just getting this information out there to the right.
[00:26:02] Dennis McKenna: Getting the information out there. Exactly. That's what we're trying to do here. Yeah.
[00:26:08] Andy Weil: You know, I've been on this. I have tried for, what is it now, almost 50 years to change people's attitudes about coca, to bring it to the attention of my fellow physicians. And I will continue to do that. I think this is a very important mission. And now I think one thing that adds to this movement, there's such consciousness about indigenous rights and indigenous sovereignty. And that really hasn't been part of the conversation until recently. You know, this was the sacred plant of millions of indigenous people, and we have demonized it, we have tried to eradicate it, we've tried to keep those people from using it, and we've exposed ourselves to the most dangerous element of it in pure form. As I said, it's the perfect example of how to go wrong in our relationships with the natural world.
[00:27:01] Wade Davis: You know, Andy, one of the most incredible revelations that people will hear about at the conference will come from Dawson White, who in many ways has taken up Tim's mantle. He was at the Field Museum for a long time. Now he's at Harvard. But you know, Tim, as you well remember, based on just morphological and crossing experiments, had concluded that the coca of Columbia, Erythroxylum novogranatense, was derived from the coca of Peru. And he created a whole kind of a phylogenetic tree based on his field work. But in an amazing way, through genetic analysis, DNA that was not available to Tim back in the 70s, Dawson has shown that that is probably not true, that in fact, both of the cocas, the coca of Colombia, which is very different morphologically, and the coca of Peru or Bolivia, are derived independently from the same wild ancestor, Erythrosine gracilipes, which is a plant of the Montaña, the cloud forests, and below, that really grows all the way the length of the Andean Cordillera in South America. But here's the incredible thing. What that means is that you have a major cultivated plant that was independently domesticated, literally 1500 to 2000 miles apart, from the same wild source and the same properties developed through selection. And more importantly, in both places, in both civilizations, the plant very quickly deemed to be sacred, the plant of all plants. And I don't think there's another example of that. Even in basic agriculture, you can think of a major cultigen that has been independently developed at two geographical extremities, let alone a plant that is a natural stimulant, a sacred plant that we now know from the archeological record has been used by humans for at least 8,000 years. And as we learn from Susie Mejía, who will be coming with her great coca project From Medellin, for 10 years, Susie has been, with her colleague Danny Montoya, has been studying coca through the archaeological record, through the field, and they have put together an archive of coca use through space and time that is simply astonishing. It just shows that every single human population, from the level of grand civilizations, from the Nazca, the Paracas, Moche, Chimu, Inca, whatever, to the village level, this plant has not only been used as a medicine and a useful natural stimulant, it's been revered as a sacred plant. And I don't think that has any precedent in the entire relationship between human beings and the plant realm.
[00:30:07] Dennis McKenna: Quite Possibly I am thinking of Michael Pollan's assertion that, you know, we form these relationships with useful plants in the context of food, for example, he said, did we domesticate corn or did corn domesticate us?
And the same considerations might be said of coca. Here's a plant that existed in the wild, the ancestor of the coca, of the domesticated coca, and humans recognized its properties and formed an alliance with them and domesticated them.
And it was beneficial to the humans and it was beneficial to the coca. I mean, so, you know, in sort of in evolutionary terms, for a plant to get become domesticated, that's a major accomplishment because then we protect it from the vicissitudes of natural selection, you know, and it's survival, the part of the bargain is that it's vulnerable to the effects of the artificial selection, artificial things we might do to it, such as isolate the chief component and turn it into an abusable drug. I mean, that's what humans do.
We're not content to just use the plant in its natural form. We have to somehow improve it by isolating this toxic compound which has its place. But on the whole, it's not a good thing.
[00:31:48] Andy Weil: It took a remarkably long time for Europeans to pay any attention to cocoa and to be interested in it scientifically. And when they did, in the mid-1800s, almost immediately afterwards, cocaine was isolated and all research stopped on the plant and everything proceeded with the isolated compound and the belief that it was equivalent. The only thing of interest in the leaf.
[00:32:11] Dennis McKenna: A lot of these alkaloidal plants in the 19th century. This is what my talk at the conference is sort of about. All of these alkaloids which could fairly easily be isolated in the pro form. And then all the attention shifted to them and the plants that they came from got neglected.
[00:32:34] Wade Davis: But there is, Dennis, there's a very interesting period before that happened when travelers and traveling physicians in Peru were writing about coca in the most marvelous ways without any bias. And their commentary is almost ingenuous. They can't quite understand this plant. It's a stimulant that's not a stimulant. It's something that you only know about by the well being it brings to your day, by your ability to focus. And whether it's Mortimer or, I mean the head of the British Medical Association, a man called Christensen, famously walking across Scotland with his students at the age of like 85 or whatever, and you know, climbing these mountains and sort of coming back to dinner and having a great dinner and saying it was rather odd. I walked quite well, you know, I was never hungry, you know, and you know, and he was chewing coca. So there's a wonderful literature that's often overlooked of how Europeans viewed coca in a pre cocaine and pre biased era. You know, there's one other point to make, this use of the word sacred. We throw it around too casually, but it actually means something. And the sacred is very different than any religious aspiration. It's about the world around you. It's not about what happens to you when you die. And the sacred is never divorced from human agency. Ritual is the ground, the fertile ground from which the sacred emerges.
And so it's our intention that turns a chalice into a sacred object or not a room of stones into a chapel. And when we say that coca is sacred throughout its entire range and throughout the depth of its history, it's because it really was. You know, the Inca would not allow you to approach a shrine if you did not have coca in your leaves. To this day, people sprinkle the leaves on the fields before they harvest. When you meet on the trail, you don't shake hands. You put together a perfect crusade of three leaves, and you blow the energy to the apus with this idea of the energy like the rain coming back to bring fertility to the lives of the living.
In the Sierra Nevada, men get together at night and they just contemplate the day that has been and anticipate the day that will come. The same thing happens in the evening in the Maloka. And so the use of coca in indigenous communities is not analogous to the use of betel in Indonesia or the drinking of beer in Germany or the taking of tea in England or coffee in Istanbul. To deny people coca in the Andes is really an act of cultural genocide, because you cannot be Runakuna if you do not partake in coca on a regular basis and with the proper protocols and ritual gestures. And so when we talk about the efforts to eradicate traditional fields, or we talk about the price of coca being propelled so high that local people can't buy the leaves because the harvest is going into the illicit market, we're really talking about cultural genocide.
[00:36:02] Andy Weil: Yeah, that's correct, Wade. And I think that's an issue that has real traction these days and that has not been properly publicized. And I think that's a point that we should really be emphasizing.
[00:36:15] Dennis McKenna: Right. I think part of what I intend to talk about is phytochemistry and pharmacotherapy was beginning to be developed in the sort of at the beginning of the 19th century, starting with Serturner's isolation of morphine. The opium poppy. That was the first pure alkaloid, and it was, okay, it's equivalent to opium. And then there was a whole series of alkaloids. Cocaine was not isolated until 1860, but there was a whole bunch of others.
And what I intend to talk about at the conference is how this was the beginning of the ostracism of spirit out of medicine.
Change in perception that we're just biochemical machines, you know, there's no spirit involved. You just apply the right molecular monkey wrench and it'll fix whatever's wrong with this. And medicine always happened in a context of understanding that these plants are intelligent entities full of vital energy.
[00:37:25] Andy Weil: Dennis, you know, shortly after the isolation of morphine, a Scottish physician invented the hypodermic syringe.
[00:37:34] Dennis McKenna: Exactly.
[00:37:35] Andy Weil: Became the first known morphine addict. And this was just in time for the American Civil War.
And we created this incredible epidemic of morphine addiction. Opium had never caused anything like this in its whole.
[00:37:51] Dennis McKenna: Right, yeah. So not only did we, you know, with our, you know, inability to resist the idea that we can somehow make something better, we can improve on the plant, we can isolate this compound, you know, and somehow that's better than the plant. And then with our human inventiveness and our lack of wisdom, but our cleverness, we proceed to develop a method of administration. So not only is that the most toxic drug, but it's the most harmful way to take it.
Efficient, but not beneficial.
[00:38:29] Wade Davis: n terms of moving the dial forward, I'd like to ask a couple of questions. Andy.
Some years ago, Jeffrey Bronfman was busted for bringing ayahuasca into the country. I think you testified. I testified.
And Jeffrey, fortunately, because of his family, had the resources to take this up. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And I believe that ayahuasca was then deemed like peyote for the Native American church, legitimate sacrament. Is there any way that we could do the same with coca? I mean, I lay claim to the fact that it is a sacred plant. And it's very strange because I find that coke is extraordinarily beneficial for my life.
It allows me to be extremely productive, content. It deals with existential malaise which we all suffer from.
And it keeps me away from these drugs that we hand out like candy for, whether it's our children with ADHD or just our general malaise. It puts people on drugs like Prozac or whatever. I mean, one of the main medical, I think, potentials of coca is to address the malady that we almost all suffer from, which is a kind of existential malaise. You know.
[00:39:55] Andy Weil: As I said, I think that we have not really pursued that argument of this being a sacred plant and how we have, you know, really not only failed to recognize that, but have completely devalued and opposed that. And at this time, when there's so much consciousness about indigenous rights, I think this would be very timely to emphasize.
[00:40:20] Wade Davis: And what about adding to that the medical issue, as you mentioned?
[00:40:24] Andy Weil: No question. No question.
[00:40:25] Wade Davis: The schedule two. I mean, what happens, for example, if I'm not proposing you do this, but you know me, Andrew Weil prescribes me coca leaves to deal with my existential malaise, or call it my depression, whatever, but what happens. I know there's issues of lack of supply. I know there are issues of no clear medical protocols, I suppose, but would that then allow me to have in my possession coca leaves?
[00:40:53] Andy Weil: Interesting. I've never been tested, Wade, and I would be happy to try it and see what happens.
[00:40:58] Wade Davis: Well, maybe this is a way to kind of bring this full circle. We get back to honoring our late beloved friend, Tim. You know, I.
[00:41:09] Dennis McKenna: I think, Wade, I think you're talking about ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is not illegal because of the Supreme Court rule. And the core of that is, it's not under the UN Convention. It is a sacred substance, so it is permitted for indigenous use.
So coca is the same. It never really occurred to me until you brought it up that indeed might be a way forward to say.
[00:41:37] Wade Davis: Well, let's talk for a moment about these UN Conventions, because they really are the key.
[00:41:42] Dennis McKenna: Yeah.
[00:41:43] Wade Davis: We talked earlier about physicians in Lima in the 1920s, looking up into the Andes, having to find a reason for these problems. And economics and land rights and distribution of wealth challenged too closely the bourgeois foundations of their lives in Lima. So they settled on coca is the cause of all evil.
But at that time, prompted by these very dubious studies, for example, I was just reading back through them yesterday. I mean, you know, the ideological thrust of the science was so blatant. You know, part of the complaint was that coca made people disobedient to the superior culture. I mean, language like that, that is just egregious to the modern ear. Wade.
[00:42:26] Andy Weil: It was the US that pushed this. You know, we were the force behind these things.
[00:42:31] Wade Davis: But you had the. You had this cohort of willing participants who had offices and labels and positions in Peru. But the key thing were these UN conventions. And when the first group came down to examine the so-called coca problem, led by the head of Burroughs welcome.
[00:42:50] Andy Weil: Yep.
[00:42:50] Wade Davis: A company, I think I forget the name of the fellow. They announced at the Lima airport upon arrival their conclusions that coca was pernicious and needed to be eradicated. And they promised the assembled press that their mission was to go out into the field to prove that assertion to be real. I mean, it was. And now those. Those conventions have really held up because they were signed by many of the countries of the world at the time. Now, interestingly, both Peru and Colombia, I mean, Bolivia rather and Colombia are challenging those. And I was recently testifying at the UN with the Colombian ambassador and the Bolivian ambassador to the UN as a Bolivian ambassador was chewing coca in the United nations building to make his point.
But it seems to me that going after, and this is why this conference is going to be so exciting, because we have people coming who are the experts on policy, drug policy. We have the vice president of Bolivia coming. And of course Bolivia has taken a lead on this. But it seems to me these are the three areas to pursue.
Dismantling and properly exposing the absurdity of these conventions and their lack of scientific basis and the plethora of bias within them. And at the second time, going after this notion that this is indeed a sacred plant.
And then thirdly, the health benefits that I need. I mean, I almost want to bring a bushel, a custale of coca through the Canadian or the U.S. customs and make myself the guinea pig for a case that could go all the way to the Supreme Court in the United States. I mean, this has to be challenged in a very public way.
Not being a completely.
I've thought many times about whether or not that's what it's going to take.
And something that really rallies the one.
[00:44:50] Dennis McKenna: Maybe Andy should be the one to bring a bushel of.
You have a lot more authority in the United States, you know.
[00:44:57] Andy Weil: Well, I have brought bushes, I have brought bushels in, Dennis, in one way or another. And you know, I used to do that before anybody knew what coca leaves were. And then I did get a permit from the drug authorities to import coca from Peru, which I did through the Harbor Botanical Museum. You know, Wade, there are a few countries that are not signatories to the UN Convention. I think South Africa is one, there's a couple of others. And it might be possible to get some projects going in one of those countries.
[00:45:26] Wade Davis: That's very interesting.
[00:45:27] Dennis McKenna: Did you facilitate Dr. McCurdy getting coca leaves, Andy.
[00:45:33] Andy Weil: I have done everything I can. It is just appalling that he's been Unable to get coca leaves.
[00:45:38] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, it's ridiculous.
You can't. You have no magic button.
[00:45:44] Wade Davis: No. And just. But just so the people listen, Dennis, just so people listening to this podcast understand what that means. That Christopher can't get leaves. In other words, it's. They set up a catch, a kind of a. What's the word?
[00:45:58] Andy Weil: A kind of catch 22.
[00:46:00] Wade Davis: In other words, they can't do anything for coca until they have medical studies and then they do everything to prevent those studies being done. And that's exactly what's going on. Christopher is a world authority and he's investigated other psychoactive substances. He's got the laboratory.
If anyone was honest, we would want to know what this plant has.
[00:46:25] Andy Weil: Wade, I told him he should enlist the help of his Congress representatives. They can lean on the authority and the agencies and maybe with the change of administration, he can find some allies in Congress who can put that kind.
[00:46:38] Dennis McKenna: Of pressure on RFK could probably facilitate that.
I have lots of reservations about rfk, but I'm delighted from solely the vaccine, that's the only problem. Other stances are right on the money and he could facilitate this.
[00:46:59] Andy Weil: Guys, I'm going to have to leave you because of pressures. And Dennis, I wish you all success with this conference in any way I can help get this word out.
[00:47:08] Wade Davis: Andy, before you go, maybe Dennis, it would be nice to have a kind of a 10 second simple message from Andy, not for us, but for the conference. Would you do that, Andy?
[00:47:20] Andy Weil: Yeah. I am delighted that this conference is happening. It's about time. Coca is one of the most important medicinal plants in the world. It is also a plant of enormous historical, cultural, scientific, botanical interest. And it has been neglected. Not only neglected by the scientific community, but also demonized by European North American culture. And it's time to really change that. We have denied ourselves the many benefits of this plant while exposing ourselves to the dangers of one element of it which does not represent the actions of the plant. And the only way this is going to change is with a change in consciousness. And it will happen through the work that you guys are doing.
[00:48:08] Dennis McKenna: You too, Andy. Thank you so much.
[00:48:10] Wade Davis: Thanks, Andy, for doing this.
[00:48:12] Dennis McKenna: This will be a historic podcast.
[00:48:16] Andy Weil: Great. Okay, bye.
[00:48:18] Dennis McKenna: Have a wonderful day, both of you.
[00:48:21] Wade Davis: Okay, thanks, Dennis.
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