There are roughly 250 species of erythroxylon coca plants around the world.
About 20 coca species produce cocaine alkaloids. However, only two of them, erythroxylon coca var coca and erythroxylon novogranatense, provide enough cocaine alkaloids to justify commercial operations for the drug that is cocaine.
Upon CHEWING COCA LEAVES a person gets a pleasant sense of WELL-BEING, INCREASED ENERGY and POSITIVE MOOD.
Drinking coca tea can also make the person feel more alert and puts him or her in a good state of mind. Other ways of administration of coca leaf may exert a more dramatic impact on the consumer. Unlike coca tea, purified cocaine can pose substantial risks to health.
Yet sensitivity to coca leaf varies in some consumers.
Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910), an Italian doctor (neurologist, physiologist and anthropologist) working in Argentina in the 1850s, was very fond of enjoying the positive effects of coca leaf:
…I sneered at the poor mortals condemned to live in this valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the spaces of 77, 438 words, each more splendid than the one before…An hour later, I was sufficiently calm to write these words in a steady hand: God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effect of coca all lifelong. I would rather have a life span of ten years with coca than one of 10 000 000 (and here I has inserted a line of zeros) centuries without coca.
Dr Mantegazza also believed that some drugs and foods would alter humankind in the distant future, he defended the experimental investigation and use of COCA as one of the MIRACLE MEDICINES.
When Paolo Mantegazza came back from Peru, where he had witnessed and studied the use of coca leaf by the native people, he could chew coca leaves and then test and document the effects on himself in 1859. Soon after, he wrote a paper titled “Sulle Virtù Igieniche e Medicinali della Coca e sugli Alimenti Nervosi in Generale” (“On the hygienic and medicinal properties of coca and on nervous nourishment in general”).
He admired and thoroughly enjoyed the POWERFUL STIMULATING EFFECT of cocaine alkaloids in coca leaves on COGNITION and MENTAL PERFORMANCE.