Manuela Picq: The People Behind the Coca Leaf

This is the human center of The Many Faces of Coca.

By the time coca enters Western conversations, it’s already been abstracted—reduced to policy, drugs, or crime. But for millions of people, coca isn’t any of those things.

It’s daily life.

In this final episode of the series, we speak with political theorist and anthropologist Manuela Picq, who has lived and worked alongside communities in the Andes and Amazon. This conversation moves beyond theory and into lived reality—how coca functions as food, medicine, memory, and community.

We explore:

– Why coca is not cocaine—and why that distinction matters
– How prohibition reshapes entire communities
– The generational loss of cultural knowledge
– The role of women as keepers of coca traditions
– How global policy decisions impact real lives on the ground
– Why the war on coca may actually be a war on people

If Parts 1 and 2 explored the science and history of coca, this episode asks a deeper question:

What does it mean to live with this plant today?

This is Part 3 of The Many Faces of Coca
Featuring conversations with Wade Davis, Dennis McKenna, and Manuela Picq

Chapters:

00:00 Intro – Coca as Lived Reality (Not Policy)
04:05 Who Defines Coca? (Culture vs Western Narratives)
09:51 How Coca Became Criminalized
13:22 Coca in Daily Life (Food, Medicine, Community)
18:02 From Tradition to Cash Crop
22:19 Who Pays the Price? (Violence & Exploitation)
25:45 Prohibition, Capitalism & the Drug War
28:35 Women, Knowledge & Hidden Traditions
33:37 Is Coca Control Really About Power?
36:32 The UN, Policy & Global Disconnect
40:09 What the World Gets Wrong About Coca
41:15 Closing Thoughts (End of Interview)
43:07 Post-Conversation Reflection (Why This Series Matters)
45:31 Where to Go Next (Series, Patreon, Discord)

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Transcript

speaker-0 (00:20.728)
By the time COCA enters the Western conversation, it's usually already abstracted. It's a policy problem, a drug problem or security problem. Rarely is it discussed as a lived reality. This conversation is about COCA as it exists right now in daily life and families and communities that don't have that luxury of abstraction. Welcome back to Divergent States. I'm Elite, host, founder of Psychonaut and host tonight. And I'm back with Brian as always. How's it going, man?

Hey, what's up, Yeah, I'm excited about tonight's conversation. We've got Manuela Peak. She's a political theorist and anthropologist. She's lived down alongside the indigenous people and the Andes and the Amazon. Yeah, it's really cool to kind of hear her perspective. We're going to get into what it's like on the ground for people day to day, who actually use the coca and what it's like and who it really

Who it affects on a day-to-day basis so We're going to get into that and listen to a little bit of music first If you guys want to hear the extended version go to patreon.com slash virgin states The paid tiers you'll get get the the full episode You won't have to have anything behind the paywall. We have a little fun with manuela In the patreon section. So if you guys want to hear that be sure to join on patreon also, zendo project if you guys are looking for

training on helping people with altered states just to be present in a sit there. That's the name of their training, the Zendo sit. So check out zendoproject.org if you guys want to join their sit training. They offer grounded support for people in altered states, not as a way to babysit them, but as just a way to sit with them. And that's what it's called, the sit program. So if you guys want to do that, you'll get 10 % off if you use our code DivergentS10.

Yeah, we'll get a little bit of that and helps everybody out. So again, use our affiliate code DivergentS10. You'll get 10 % off. We'll get a little bit of it. Everybody wins. So we're going to talk to Manuel Epic. We'll listen to little music. And we'll be right back.

speaker-1 (02:54.83)
you

speaker-0 (04:05.678)
Today we're speaking with Manuela, a political theorist and anthropologist who has lived and worked alongside indigenous communities in the Andes. We're talking about coca not as a theory or symbol, but something that people wake up with, work with and organize their lives around. And at the moment when international institutions are once again deciding it's fake. So welcome Manuela, thank you for joining us.

speaker-2 (04:28.984)
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

speaker-0 (04:31.982)
Great to have you. So what I'd to get off start with, yeah, start with is who gets to define COCA. So when COCA is discussed internationally, who usually gets to speak?

speaker-2 (04:45.23)
I think that's the problem with everything, right? Who gets to define what is nature? For indigenous peoples, nature is an invention of culture. For many communities, coca is a grandmother. It's a leaf, a tree, a knowledge system from which we come from. It's a daily aspect of life. It's not a drug. It's not something to be regulated. It's something.

to keep health, to keep community flowing, right? What's interesting in that question is to look at older ceramics, like 1,000 years old, like 2,000 years old ceramics, some 4,000 years old ceramic from the Valdivia region. They already have coca. You have little figurines with a little chewing coca in their cheeks, right? And so you can see that these very old pieces already have the shamans represented with the coca.

And in Bolivia, at least until now, it's something that intellectuals are chewing on as they're writing their books. Just workers are chewing on. It's like having a cup of coffee.

speaker-0 (05:56.602)
Nice. Yeah, that's it. We talked to Wade when we talked to Wade, it was he talked about the nutritional content and how, you know, how nutritious it was and had calcium and iron. And it's really important, especially in those higher altitudes, which, you know, I imagine that's a that's a core part of it, too, the nutritional aspect.

speaker-2 (06:17.132)
Yeah, the altitude, it's very good for your stomach. It's medicine, just like you'll have some ginger tea when you have a stomach ache. Coca is even better than ginger, but it just calms your stomach. It calms vomiting. It calms altitude sickness. So it's a little tea that you have there on hand, you know, from tourists visiting to the grandmother before falling asleep or the child who gets a stomach ache.

speaker-0 (06:48.108)
Nice. Yeah, so it's kind of just universally used and everybody uses it. So as we're talking about, as it gets discussed, whose voices are most often missing from those conversations?

speaker-2 (07:02.296)
So I would say the voices that are missing from the conversation are indigenous voices, but I want to reframe myself and say local voices. Because who is indigenous? And that's a political question of its own. You're somebody's Indian, right? Being indigenous is like being the periphery of somebody. It means to have been colonized. So no indigenous person identifies as indigenous. People identify as Yanomami, as Quechua, as Kanyari, as Waorani.

as Cherokee or Dine or as Sapmi. The label indigenous comes from states, right? Then it's a homogenizing category of colonized. So a lot of scholars of indigeneity, legal scholars, for instance, they say indigenous peoples are everywhere where there are colonized peoples. Palestine is indigenous territory because it's under occupation. And then you have...

Other examples, instance, Hawaiians refuse to be on the list of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a recognized tribe. They say, we're not your tribe. We do not want to be on the list of recognized tribes in the US because we are Hawaiians and you've annexed us. So I will refrain from saying indigenous and I will say local. Local communities.

that may be recognized as indigenous or not, that are just inheriting this knowledge from the ecosystems, communities that are living in the local, that are living with their rivers, forests, interspecies relations, have this relationship with coca. And they're never consulted, they're never heard because they don't have PhDs, they're not biologists from Western Northern universities.

And they're not considered to have scientific knowledge to contribute. So of course, there is the racism of who has science. But there is also the discrimination of oral histories and oral orality as a form of knowledge and the transmission intergenerationally of this plant and the medicine aspect, but also just the spiritual aspect of this plant that holds communities together across generations.

speaker-2 (09:16.278)
So we know, for instance, now there is this recognition, again, from scientists, that there is such thing as genetic memory, or genes carry memory that we may not be aware of. And indigenous peoples, for instance, do the drums because it wakens up memory in the genes. But coca is one of these elements, one of these members of the community that holds genetic memory. And that is an important part of

the life ways and the extended communities beyond the human of many communities in South America.

speaker-0 (09:51.182)
That kind of leads me my next question. When those voices are excluded, who ends up speaking about it instead?

speaker-2 (09:58.296)
science, states, whiteness. It's a combination. And I would say that often even states from the global south are excluded. So it's the most powerful states first who will speak with authority or be heard. Then you have scientific representatives of the global north, eventually some of the global south. But even in the global south, in South America,

especially in countries like Bolivia. Across the Andes, I would say, it's very understood, even among state actors, that coca is not the problem. The challenge is, how do you get, if you're a state and you need funds, how do you get the funds from the World Health Organization or USAID, now they're gone, but for many years they were there, to try to just design policy with a little more flow, a little more cash.

without framing COCA in the eyes of what the US wants, what the international system wants. And this is an experience that Afghanistan had with...

With opiums, the poppies were not criminalized and became criminalized in part as a state strategy of state building of getting money from the international community to control this forbidden drug. And the challenge is not just to integrate voices of the global south, but to gain enough autonomy from states and scholars in the global south. And the end is in particular.

to resist the narrative and shift the narrative and resist being bought by the narrative of the global north of criminalizing and labeling it as a drug.

speaker-0 (11:46.154)
So what assumptions do outside policy makers usually bring with them?

speaker-2 (11:51.278)
criminalization, right? this coca is medicine and just tea. But then if you listen to the international system, because it's associated with cocaine, even though most coca plants have less than 1 % of its structure that's actually used in the cocaine production.

speaker-0 (12:13.464)
the alkaloid.

speaker-2 (12:14.764)
the alkaloid, it's very little what you get from the plant and the relationship with the whole plant and not with this 1 % alkaloid that becomes the cocaine after being processed. But the cocaine global structure, which is massive indeed, has led governments to criminalize and see the problem in the plants instead of understanding how the plants.

was transformed to make its way into global capitalist structures. So the narrative returns to the region as it's a crime, it's dangerous, it's killing people everywhere, we need to control eradicate it. And it with all of its communities, right?

speaker-0 (12:58.53)
Yeah, was something I think even, you know, Wade Davis, I'll refer back to that a couple of times, but he talked about, you know, like the eradication efforts started 60 years before it even became illegal. So it's been a long time, you know, they've been trying to stamp it out. So what does, you know, COCA look like in everyday life right now for communities you've lived with?

speaker-2 (13:22.082)
I mean, it's little plants that you have and people in Bolivia, for instance, walk around with their little bag of beautiful hand-woven, colorful mini purses, often made of wool, that they carry around and they have leaves inside and they just chew the leaves, trash them after a few hours, get some more leaves, right? It's something you arrive somewhere you meet instead of smoking a cigarette or get a beer.

or drinking a coffee, you just sit in a public bench and choose some leaves and chat. It's like offering a glass of water or a cup of coffee to someone when you meet. There is nothing dangerous in its use, and it's very much a daily, tender, healthy activity.

speaker-0 (14:08.531)
how ordinary is it, coca use among everyone.

speaker-2 (14:13.23)
In Bolivia, it's extremely useful. would say it's 80 % of the population. In Bolivia, in Peru and Ecuador, it's much less common. So in Ecuador, where I live, it's more a medicine we have with the chamomile tea in the cabinet. And we take maybe two, three times a week at night, or when we're coming back from a trip to deal with the altitude, or when a kid has a stomach ache.

speaker-0 (14:42.574)
Is Sosco mostly practical or is it cultural or political?

speaker-2 (14:48.332)
It depends who you ask. If you ask the WHO, it's going to be political. If you ask the USA, the USDA, it's going to be economic and creating parallel states. If you ask Latin American communities, especially the rural ones, it's food, it's medicine, it's family.

speaker-0 (15:09.26)
Yeah, it's very pragmatic, practical uses. Yeah. Do you see how different generations relate to coca?

speaker-2 (15:17.76)
Yes, that's a great question actually because of the criminalization it's become perceived as something problematic slash dangerous by younger generations. So you do have a little bit of a loss. I would say the generations under 40 now are much less keen on using it daily as their parents or grandparents would precisely because there is this political and international narrative of

eradicate coca, it's a problem, right? So it's just plus with the homogenization of the food system and the food chain, right? Fast foods and everybody now has coffees or Coca-colas and the space and the social role of coca is not eradicated, but it's certainly being provincialized, right? Sidelined progressively ever more.

each generation.

speaker-0 (16:17.422)
It's shame. It is a shame that the younger cultures, I guess, or younger people, they're not finding the value in it. So yeah, it feels like a valuable part of the culture that is just kind of being eradicated along with the leaf. And people often hear traditional and they assume that it's something kind of frozen in time. How dynamic would you say Coca culture is today?

speaker-2 (16:46.52)
So it's very dynamic and the elders in Bolivia, if we go from Bolivia all the way to Colombia, In Bolivia, it's something that's still very cultural and the indigenous presence is super strong in Bolivia. You will go to markets, are not stands, people literally open their fabric on the ground or buckets and they will have on the ground the coca leaves, the dried potatoes, right? All of the fruits that they're selling, the animals are live.

The more you go up north in the Andes and the closer you get to Colombia, the more coca is about markets, illicit markets, selling to make profits, right? And in a way, the culture of the coca becomes replaced by the modern narco-capitalist culture of making it for profit. So where it exists, it's increasingly

about cocaine, it's increasingly about making a living. We used to sell corn or coffee, but the prices went down. And now with the demand and the options for survival in our territories, we produce corn.

speaker-0 (18:02.442)
It's very much a cash crop, it sounds like. So what does it mean to live with a plant that's both simultaneously ordinary and criminalized at the same time?

speaker-2 (18:05.056)
Exactly.

speaker-2 (18:16.718)
I think it's much more heterogeneous than we think. The north is much more the cash crop, the illicit markets, but people are just harvesting like they would harvest anything else. Certainly like they have been harvesting coffee for centuries. And in the south, it's still something that exists in every kitchen, in every pocket to share with the grandparents or the neighbors.

The fact that it's older generations who transmit that knowledge keeps some of the wisdom associated with it and the sacrality and its social role. It's not something that young people are doing in nightclubs, right? Maybe they're having smoking joints, but the Coca leaves is not about that. It's more about chilling with your grandparents in the living room on Sunday afternoon.

speaker-0 (19:14.318)
That's cool, so it's about continuity and not nostalgia really. so how does the criminalization shape daily life? And as you kind of already mentioned, in the North it's more about the commerce and everything, in the South I guess it's more the traditional use. But do you see that criminalization kind of, I guess, affecting the more traditional use in the South?

speaker-2 (19:41.378)
Yeah, the problem is that the criminalization is really of cocaine, but coca is seen as cocaine, even though it's not. So there is this confusion that coca is cocaine and coca leaves are not cocaine. But then the criminalization in that confusion gets expanded to the leaves, to the plants. And so it starts disappearing from circulation in the more.

in the areas where the cocaine market is stronger, or at least the coca markets for illicit production of cocaine in the north of the Andes. And in those areas, what you see is the loss of the daily usage in relation to the plant and the replacement of cocaine. So you see the leaf becoming.

something reserved for the elites, for exports, for market, but not for personal consumption and much less for daily life. And it impacts mostly the youth. This production, so you have some, of course, the production sites where you have peasants, campesinos, who are producing it, harvesting, who make very little money.

But then you have the rest of the chain for the illicit global markets. And you have a lot of young people who are not necessarily even consuming cocaine, who are not consuming coke anymore either. They have lost that knowledge and that relation with ancestors. But they're working for these global markets. They're usually, if they are under drugs, they're consuming bazooka, which is the leftover, the cheapest leftovers of the cocaine.

It's young people who are in a way doomed to these markets of exploitation and extraction of human life and value for profit in global markets. And they're very young. They live in a lot of violence. They're often racialized. They suffer violence from gangs, often forcibly recruited from the governments, from the military, who receive usually funds from the United States or international organizations to fight organized crime on their bodies.

speaker-2 (21:56.428)
And so they are in this trap where they're working for a plant without being in relation for that plant anymore, where that plant is completely transformed to become cocaine, something else, and being exported on global markets. And they really fall in the abyss of all the negative sides of all of these economies.

speaker-0 (22:19.19)
It sounds like it. Yeah. So who would you say absorbs most of the consequences of these laws and practices in reality?

speaker-2 (22:30.606)
So it's really everybody who is working on the cocaine chain gets the worst side. So if you think about the peasants in Colombia, for instance, you have people who used to produce other crops, like let's say coffee. The prices go down. All of the cartels and mafias of the world are buying Colombian coca to produce cocaine. Certainly, the Mexican cartels.

So you start producing coca leaves for the cocaine market and selling it. And you get trapped into these illicit markets. You get criminalized by the government. Various cartels are fighting to buy your production, criminalizing you, threatening you, torturing you if you don't sell to them and sell to the other producer, like cartel. So it's a very dangerous world. And then all of the younger people who work

either distributing or transforming the leaf into cocaine and selling it on local or global markets are also people vulnerable to these illicit economies, right? So they are illegal. What they do is illegal. They are on the bottom end of receiving any kind of payment. And they have very short lifetimes. We don't have a lot of numbers.

In Ecuador right now, Ecuador has 80 % of the cocaine that leaves to global market comes from the ports of Ecuador. So it's the headquarters of cocaine globally. Mostly Colombian, but also Peruvian cocaine. So it's the warehouse of cocaine in the world. And the kids that are being recruited are as young as 10 years old.

And if they speak to the police, if they speak, if they denounce, they have their tongues cut off to deter other kids not to speak to the police. So you have kids who are super poor who have parents who are working three jobs in poor neighborhoods of the ports of Ecuador's coast. They are 10, 12 years old. They're recruited in school. They're given a house or an apartment, a gun, and $200 a month and say, just watch

speaker-2 (24:46.562)
this cocaine, don't let anybody touch it, we're going to come and they use people and their spaces as warehouses to keep transferring the drug and putting it on boats. And it's not really a choice and their life expectancy is very low and the level of violence they live in is extremely high. They learn to be killers, hit men at 14, 15.

So it's entire generations that are being killed by the transformation of a plant that used to be sacred.

speaker-0 (25:18.402)
Yes, yeah, I'm just thinking about the, seems to me that a lot of the harm that causes that comes from this is actually direct result of capitalism and these laws that get passed. So, kind of speaking on that same little subject, how does the enforcement change how people relate to COCA?

speaker-2 (25:45.65)
So I think the point there is the prohibition. The prohibition of coca is the big mistake in every sense. First, we lose the plant with all of its properties. Second, we lose the relation with ancestral knowledge that's held in plants. Third, the prohibition creates profits. Prohibition systems?

like with alcohol in the US, it creates profit and benefit and it creates the cartels and the mafia and the gangs. So without the prohibition, you don't have the profit, you don't have the marks, you don't have the violence and the guns and all the mafia organization from the local to the global. In Bolivia, the coca leaf has not been criminalized and that's why people can keep the relation to it, keep using it. And it's very cheap.

speaker-0 (26:27.776)
you

speaker-2 (26:40.398)
It's out in the open in the markets. In Ecuador or Colombia, where it has been criminalized, where it's considered a drug, a dangerous drug, an illicit economy, then it becomes something to make profits on and something that is dangerous and that puts lives at risk. Not necessarily the plants, but the economies that the transformation of this plant into cocaine enables. And so everybody becomes an enemy to everybody.

Families are dismantled. Immigration starts. A lot of the migration to the US has to do with the violence due to cocaine markets. So it's a spiral that enables the military industrial complex, that enables these very migrants that are fleeing violence are used as mules through Central America to bring drugs and cocaine, in particular, into the US. So it's a spiral of which

Only the global financial and economic elites profits.

speaker-0 (27:44.846)
Yeah, and it makes me see how much privilege we really do have, we have living in the North like this or in North America where, you know, those day-to-day realities of, as you said, know, kids as young as 10 and 14, you know, being harmed by this through the prohibition. it's, a lot of it, the harm comes from the prohibition, just as you kind of talked about there and that's...

You know, something that, you know, part of the whole reason I even wanted to start this series, even though we're kind of a psychedelic podcast where, you know, a lot of those same issues with plant medicines and, you know, local or indigenous rights, as you said, a lot of those things kind of intersect all around the same issue. So, so how does coca intersect with gender?

speaker-2 (28:35.926)
So this maybe connects the two questions. Coca now is held as knowledge, mostly by women and shamans. So grandmothers in Bolivia, as I was mentioning, women carrying that knowledge and that relation, women giving herbs, medicine women giving herbs, curing diseases, taking care of children, women giving birth.

and use the coca. And you still have a lot of just market women, indigenous market women who have plans to cure people, people in different cities of Ecuador, it's a different day. But you still have market women who are there with all their plants that they went to the mountain to collect, to the jungle, and they bring them to the market and they clean you. They clean the spirits, the energy. It's either Tuesday or Thursday, depending on the market. And you pay $5 and they clean you up.

And so they use coca for that. So you still have that relation as medicine. But it's becoming ever more gendered and ever more niche of only some medicine people, and often medicine women, maintaining that relationship with the plant, with coca. And a lot of the time, it's the more public and cocaine, the more

violent public market aspect is gendered as masculine, as cartel, as narco culture in a way.

speaker-0 (30:10.008)
Tony Montana. It doesn't love Tony Montana. That whole, yeah. So who gets to control the narrative of Kokan?

speaker-2 (30:22.862)
So I think that gender narrative has a lot to do with public space or private space. I would say that the public narrative is the masculine narrative of the dangerous coca. It's the narrative of borders, of the drug wars, the war on drugs, and all of the Plan Colombia with the US government sending millions of dollars to Colombia to fight these producers, these dangerous producers of coca.

And then the other side is the more feminine, private medicine aspect, often in private spheres. In Bolivia, still very public, but in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, mostly used during ceremonies, during treatments, in more discrete ways and in more intimate ways. And in that sense, feminine spaces.

speaker-0 (31:21.642)
So who is most visible when CoCA is discussed and who's more punished?

speaker-2 (31:28.504)
I would say coca is discussed by men in international spaces, in government, in diplomatic spaces.

speaker-0 (31:39.31)
Yeah, that's probably the most visible is the men in the political realm, right?

speaker-2 (31:43.766)
It's the men in ties who are talking about coca. But the people who are using coca, not cocaine, the people using coca are the women. And as usual, women are using it for collective purposes, for healing purposes, in private space without much talk. So that these two dynamics, they coexist in the Andes in particular. They're concomitant. And it says they were like.

the sky river and the river on the ground. One is recognized and the other is not, but it actually holds more water than the river on the ground.

speaker-0 (32:20.974)
Yeah, I like that metaphor. That's a good one. Yeah. How does gender shape vulnerability?

speaker-2 (32:29.672)
One of the vulnerabilities is that if you're not speaking, if you're not heard, and you continue doing it, your narrative doesn't count. So the only narrative that counts is the criminalizing one. And so the criminalization of women and of women's knowledge, we can go back to the 1600 and the witches, right? But this narrative of women doing forbidden things,

practices that are considered non-scientific, because science says it's dangerous and it's a drug. Formal science, Women carrying these old forms of knowing in their daily practices are increasingly discriminated as dangerous worlds, illegal worlds. And indigenous women have already very few rights, and they become more vulnerable because they can be criminalized.

under the whole codification of drug trafficking, terrorism, and transporting narco drugs.

speaker-0 (33:37.198)
Is coca regulation ultimately really about the plan or is it about controlling people?

speaker-2 (33:44.682)
It's never been about the plants because the plant is healthy and is around. It's always been about controlling people. It's creating borders. Why do you create a border to have the inside and the outside? So why do you criminalize to create the legal and the illegal? Without the illegal, you don't have the legal. Without racialized immigrants, you don't have white citizens.

speaker-0 (34:09.178)
It kind of reminds me, I guess there's the old 60s, I guess it was Lyndon B. Johnson used to say, you make the poorest white man thinks he's better than a black man, he'll vote for you either way. So kind of that racialized undertones as well there. So as the UN revisits COCA, what's actually at stake for the people that are on the ground that use COCA today?

speaker-2 (34:32.962)
I think we are all at stake. So the people on the ground are at stake of having not just their daily life and daily medicine criminalized further, but to have their ancestral life ways, their memories, their collective, their cosmology and world ways, like life ways through generations criminalized. Because if you say that coca today is criminal, all of these little figurines from 2000 years ago with little coca in their cheeks,

Are they criminal? Were they already terrorists, narco-terrorists 2,000 years ago? So you have a discrimination of an entire life way and generations of people who hold knowledge, who hold biodiversity on their territories. That's one. But two, I think we're all at stake because it gives way to criminalize COCA and to increase in power and strengthen this prohibition regime around COCA.

gives way to pharmaceutical corporations and reinforces one form of medicine that is a medicine that can only be distributed by pharmaceuticals, by doctors in a certain context, and none of the rest counts. Today's coca tomorrow it's another plant. These other ways of curing, of staying healthy becomes de-validated, irrelevant, and almost fake.

And so it's a homogenization, a centralization of what can be science, of what can be health, and what can be knowledge, not only in the West by governments, but also in the hands of powerful pharmaceutical corporations.

speaker-0 (36:13.378)
Yeah, I think that's really important to cut, as you said, homogenize it to bring in all those, those different points of view and then practices from all, all from everyone from around the world. Kind of speaking on the same, how disconnected are those decisions from a lived reality?

speaker-2 (36:32.492)
I would say completely, would say most of them have never been in touch with indigenous communities or local communities who live with and on coca. They don't understand what coca is and its benefits. And I would say a lot of them are connected to pharmaceutical corporations and at least lobbied, at least in part, by these global transnational corporate actors.

speaker-0 (36:58.904)
Yeah. Again, it goes back to the capitalism. so I think one thing that's stuck out through this whole series is how it keeps coming back to that. All the same triggers are pushing at this. So again, as the UN revisits it, what mistakes are likely to be repeated this time?

speaker-2 (37:24.686)
I think it's very hard not to repeat mistakes if you keep the same people in the room. If we want to avoid mistakes and change the narrative, we need to add new voices, replace old voices. We definitely need to bring women in. We need to bring Latin American actors in. We need to bring people in who have grown with coca. We need at least to hear their testimonies.

At worst and at best, we need to give them not just a voice but a vote in these decisions. And even indigenous communities who are not familiar with coca, who have grown up in Greenland, who have other plants, they know the value of plants and they know how one relates to plants and the mediation between humans and plants and the exchanges between humans and plants. And the problem of capitalism is accumulation.

Any plant, it becomes a source of accumulation, becomes a problem. Any life source becomes problematic when it is used, extracted for profits. And the problem is not coca. After coca, will be another plant, another ecosystem that will disappear, other ways of knowing through plants that will be at risk.

speaker-0 (38:50.796)
Yes, the who benefits if nothing changes.

speaker-2 (38:55.458)
The cartels and the mafia's. They probably are within governments too by now.

speaker-0 (38:57.582)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (39:02.382)
Yeah, I was going to say I'm sure that there's plenty of money coming from them into the governments too. Yeah, a lot of times when there's like legalization, it just turns into a money laundering sort of scheme.

speaker-2 (39:15.342)
It's impossible to dissociate between cartels, mafias and the government, whether it's in Italy, in Venezuela, in Colombia, Mexico, or Albania, or Russia. The gangs have learned to infiltrate the government to design policy. So when we have governments designing policy at the WHO, we should really question who is designing that policy for whose interest and profit.

speaker-0 (39:43.906)
Yeah, that's true. You look at who's actually where what do they always say follow the money, right? Right.

speaker-2 (39:50.678)
If you can, erasing your face.

speaker-0 (39:55.666)
So just to kind of, you know, we're winding this down a little bit on the public side. If people outside these communities could understand just one thing about coca, it exists today, what would you say that should be?

speaker-2 (40:09.144)
Coca is a generous plant that holds a lot of ancestral knowledge, that is a life holder, a gentle, generous life holder for generations to come. And that should be protected not just as a plant, as a sacred plant, but as a relation between humans and the more than human world that needs more than ever to be revitalized.

in a context of global climate collapse, it's really important that humans learn to relate, restore their relations to nature, to animals, to plants, to rivers. And coca is one of these plants that has been for thousands of years central to human nature, what we call human nature, because humans are nature, right? But to these interspecies relations that we should value as a tool.

for building futures in which humans reconsider themselves as part of nature and protect nature as their home.

speaker-0 (41:15.278)
So yeah, guys, this is going to wrap up the public side of the episode.

This is the lived reality of the coca. And I hope this showed everyone what that lived reality on the ground is. We've got Wade Davis, Dennis McKenna, earlier episodes talking about the history of ethnobotany. And this really, this is at the human center of this whole project. So Manuela, again, thank you so much for being here. We're going to move over to Patreon. If you guys want to listen to this section, head over to patreon.com slash Diversion States. We're going to have a whole section over there.

Little more laid back, so we'll see you then. That's right. See you later.

speaker-1 (42:36.494)
you

speaker-0 (43:07.31)
So that was our conversation with Manuela Pick. That was a lot of fun. That was great. Dude, yeah. It's been really cool. As I said, when I kind of started this, was such a huge blind side of mine, a big blind spot of what is all this? Why do we ignore this coca? But it's coming together. I see a more kind of balanced.

position of it all. Yeah, I would agree. This has been very enlightening for me working through these different episodes that we've made talking about this plant because you know, everybody knows here I'm a prude. I don't really know a whole lot. And that's been eye opening to see like, especially to hear like, just to how prominent it is in the culture, you know, that everybody's usually got like a little satchel is like different colors, like, so imagining like the like, people like

Like it's like a extension of your personality in a way is like, um, Right. goes back thousands of years. Yeah. Yeah. I just think it sounds crazy, dude. It's, it's cool. It really is. And it's, it's, like I said, it's this little piece of, piece of culture thousands of years. it's kind of, and to me, it also kind of shines, shines a light or reflection on our own, psychedelic exceptionalism. When we talk about these psychedelics and these plant medicines.

And what do we, you know, we ignore coca, you know, this huge, amazing, as we found just multifaceted, you know, leaf plant medicine out there and it gets ignored and demonized. So you guys, if you guys want to check out the rest of the series, we've got Dennis McKenna, Wade Davis and others. We're all talking about talking about coca, not really about cocaine so much, even though it comes up in there. So you guys go back to the.

Extra, you know earlier episodes and check those out Also, you guys want to hear the extended versions extended cuts where we just hang with Wade Davis or hang with Dennis Talk for about 15 20 minutes kind of just winding down join patreon Patreon.com slash diversion states. That's it's where we're at I'm gonna start thinking about doing maybe like a Monthly integration or live stream where we could all chat. Maybe we'll do that in the discord

speaker-0 (45:31.758)
Yeah, don't forget guys, we got a Discord out there too. You can find the link for that in the show notes or you can find it over on our Psychonaut on Reddit. and if you guys need, if you guys want anything, hit me up, give me a text. You guys want to tell a story or something? Hit us up in the, hit us on an email, hit us in the text in the show notes. Almost always responding to those. So, All right guys, well, it's been a great episode.

And I think we'll get it wound down here and we'll talk to you next time. think next time we're going to have Dennis Walker on. That'd be a great show. Absolutely. Yeah. So you guys keep exploring out there and we'll talk to you next time. you later.

speaker-1 (46:17.71)
you