5 ms·
Anyone here ever actually try coca leaves? Going to guess its effects are somewhere between coffee and cocaine
by JasserInicide 2y ago
Anyone here ever actually try coca leaves? Going to guess its effects are somewhere between coffee and cocaine
- jbverschoor 2y agoOnly coca tea. It's a small boost, perhaps like coffee if you don't drink coffee everyday
- sddsdd 2y agoHad a lot of them chewed or in tea in Bolivia and it's pretty close to a caffeine buzz, it's very, very mild.
- _yb2s 2y agoCaffeine affects people differently… it has very intense effects on me- I would never call it “very very mild”
- sddsdd 2y agoFor the vast majority of people caffeine is very mild compared to cocaine. Coca leaves are in the ballpark of caffeine, however you would rate that subjectively. And personally I think I would have found it hard to tell which was which in a blind test. As a side note coca tea (or chewed leaves) are often recommended for managing altitude, and chewing leaves did seem to help with headaches I was having at > 12k feet, but again it was fairly subtle, and I am not convinced it's not just placebo/a nice distraction.
- cjbgkagh 2y agoIf I’ve gone a long time without caffeine a single coffee could keep me awake up for two consecutive all nighters. As a regular drinker I still cannot handle more than one cup of coffee per day. It turns out that I have a number of genes that increase the intensity and the duration of effect. I think genes explain most of the differences in experiences with caffeine.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoHave you done a whole genome study?
- cjbgkagh 2y agoYes, a 30x WGS, I recommend it to everyone and you only have to do it once.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoDo you have an affiliate link?
- cjbgkagh 2y agoI do not, I went with Dante Labs, they have regular discounts down to less than $250. It might take a long time though.
- valec 2y agointeresting. i have about 1-2 cups most days but 5-6 over a few hours is fine and i still get ok (but poorer quality) sleep
- _yb2s 2y agoSame, the first time I ever had a cup of coffee I missed two nights sleep. I have only done 23andme not a WGS like you, but I have at least one liver enzyme SNP that dramatically slows down caffeine metabolism. It took me quite a while to realize that the advice of "no caffeine after 5pm" or whatever needed to be something more like - no more than one cup of coffee before dawn.
- cjbgkagh 2y agoYeah, it would be nice if these general life rules / advice could be written down somewhere with the exceptions listed. I would have appreciated getting a personalized handbook that would have given me a heads up that I was different. Given the price of WGS being low enough to be generally available I think this is something humanity could benefit a lot more from.
- analog31 2y agoI think it's pretty common for visitors to Macha Picchu to receive a cup of coca tea upon arrival, for altitude sickness. The people I talked to said it was like a cup of coffee.
- jvanderbot 2y agoI can attest to the magical effects against altitude sickness.
- pvarangot 2y agoI used to drink coca tea a lot when I lived in Argentina where you get it in the supermarket. It's around on par of nicotine as an appetite suppressant for me, as a stimulant I feel caffeine and mate are better for the "stay awake" but coca tea is better for "zoning in", with less of anxiety driving but it's a more single tasked high where interruptions are harder to deal with than with caffeine. Like if I have a lot of meetings I prefer coffee and if I have to code for four hours I prefer coca tea. I used to rotate coffee, mate, and coca tea as a daily driver and having something else on the rotation may have been helping more than that something else being coca tea.
- akira2501 2y ago> single tasked high where interruptions are harder to deal with than with caffeine That comports well with my contemporary and anecdotal understanding of cocaine's most popular effects.
- smogcutter 2y agoYes, anyone who’s ever been trapped in a conversation with someone yakked to the gills can tell you all about singleminded focus as an effect of cocaine.
- pvarangot 2y agoCocaine in the U.S. is at least 5/10% anfetamines tho, so it's probably worse.
- fluoridation 2y ago>I used to drink coca tea a lot when I lived in Argentina where you get it in the supermarket. Really? I've never seen it. Were you in a northern province? Reading the comments I became curious and figured I could probably find it somewhere, but I wouldn't expect to find it in a supermarket.
- pvarangot 2y ago
- jvanderbot 2y agoI used them while hiking in Peru. It's better than caffeine, because it comes with a mild euphoria. Nothing crazy, just enough to have energy and not feel like hiking at altitude is work. When I hike with coffee I just feel determined to finish. With Coca it just felt natural to keep walking.
- lhh 2y agoI likewise had it in tea several times hiking in Peru. I personally didn’t notice any effect whatsoever, might as well have been mint tea.
- jvanderbot 2y agoPerhaps it's the fact that I was chewing them? I don't know! I'd assume tea was more potent. But I definitely had a decent reserve and was imbibing all day.
- throwup238 2y agoWikipedia says that 59% to 90% of the alkaloid is absorbed when drunk as a tea [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca
- lhh 2y agoInteresting, I'd always assumed people snorted the powder because it's not absorbed if consumed orally, but apparently that's not true. Maybe just it's just for the absorption speed? So... if someone drank industrial quantities of coca tea in one go, it'd be a 2-12 hour cocaine high?
- bluGill 2y agosnorting means it is absorbed into the bloodstream in your nose - that is very fast. Drinking means it goes through the stomach and then is released into the intestines to be absorbed (depending on what else you ate this could be slow or somewhat fast - but always much more drawn out than snorting).
- nicoburns 2y agoI'm sure it's dose / brew strength dependent, but the coca tea I had definitely had a noticable effect, but felt milder than a regular (caffiene) black tea to me. Much milder than a coffee. Mind you I'm quite caffeine sensitive, so if you YMMV.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoHad a hippy friend that discovered coca leaves while hiking in Peru. She packed a bunch to bring back with her to show us her great new discovery for natural energy. Apparently they already knew about these new things called 'coca leaves' at the border because they took them away from her. This is a true story. Friggin hippies man.
- jowdones 2y agoShe had it easy. A local guy got 3 years in prison with no parole for bringing like 70 coca leaves. The level of retardness of some countries is unbelievable. https://cluj24.ro/pictor-clujean-condamnat-la-inchisoare-pentru-frunze-de-coca-voia-sa-le-picteze-iccj-a-stabilit-o-practica-judiciara-de-la-caz-102049.html https://cluj24.ro/pictor-clujean-condamnat-la-inchisoare-pen...
- zexbha 2y agoThis is a surprise to me. That airport doesn't look at me twice when I travel through it. I've been >30 times and I'm foreign. Never once questioned anything I brought in. To be fair I'm not trafficking anything
- jowdones 2y ago>> To be fair I'm not trafficking anything Why don't you try it next time, let us know how it went :) Now seriously I think they must have had some dogs or devices to sniff up the drug, otherwise I can't explain how they isolated him from the crowd.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoI ordered some from a Bolivian website when I was a teen. I chewed them a couple times at work while doing landscaping. The closest thing I could compare it to is a nicotine buzz.
- lukeinator42 2y agoI brewed tea out of the leaves and also chewed them when hiking in Peru. Stimulant level-wise it felt similar to green tea. Maybe also a slight euphoria when chewing them but it's definitely still way less potent than a coffee (atleast for me). The only interesting side effect was that both my wife and I experienced tingling feet when combining coca leaves with acetazolamide, the altitude sickness meds we were taking (tingling feet is apparently a side effect of those meds). I wonder if on some level it does have a similar mechanism for altitude sickness?
- double0jimb0 2y agoTingling feet/toes and hands/fingers are an extremely common side-effect of acetazolamide (diamox).
- rubatuga 2y agoHad more than few cups over the past week in Peru. Going up to Puno @4000MASL, I had the same tingling hands, I thought I developed CTS! My guess is that it had to do with swelling of the extremities? Overall I found coca tea to be slightly less stimulating than coffee, but more relaxing.
- andy_ppp 2y agoIt’s extremely mild, not even as strong as coffee. It takes 1/2 a kilo of coca leaves to make 1g of cocaine! I often wonder why nobody has CRISPR-ed the genes from the Coca plant that make the alkaloids into yeast by now… given the $100bn market you’d expect someone to give this or another process a go.
- lazide 2y agoProbably because the DEA would find a reason to shoot their dog almost immediately haha
- bregma 2y agoCoca tea is ubiquitous in Peru. Morning, noon, and night. It's on a par with mate or green tea in other parts of the world. Mostly harmless. The leaves are readily available everywhere, like right beside the chewing gum at the checkout in supermarkets and the like. I tried chewing some to help offset altitude problems; it didn't help with the altitude problems but it made half my face go numb and other than that, nothing. I understand the local combine it with limestone or something to release different alkaloids but I did not.
- thelittleone 2y agoA lot of stores in Peruvian Andes sell concentrated coca leaf extract as candies. They help on higher altitude hikes. Theres one in particular that is as strong as a chemical extract. Actually quite effective as an alternative to ADHD medicine.
- jajko 2y agoI bought a bag of those very cheaply in Bolivia cca 8 years ago, locals used some sort of chalky 'activator' with it, so did I. And most if not all locals used it, ie in Potosi mines it was basically mandatory. Heck you could buy a stick of dynamite like from old westerns in random stalls across the city. I got some anesthetic effects in my mouth in the place I kept chewing them. Wasn't checking whether it made me more alert, even coffee normally doesn't have much effect on me and I drink it for the taste. Other than that, 0 effect. But I've never used any variant of cocaine so can't even compare.
- cma 2y agoThe chalky stuff was probably bannana peel ashes, they have something in them that acts as a MAOI inhibitor.