The Coca Contradiction

She tells me her name is Naomi. ´Is this your place?´ I ask, impressed. ´No no, solo trabajo.´ I dont believe her for a second, this middle aged, glamourous woman and the owner of the world´s first cocaine bar. I´d be cagey too.

So we found Route 36. Emerging blinking with the kids into the sunlight after 12 hours of darkness on Halloween night, we feel another box has been thoroughly ticked. The place has no windows so you never know how horrifyingly light it is outside. It is full of vampires, people who thrive on darkness and deviance, and it shows me the glaring coca contradiction in pure crystaline form.

Coca is an essential product for the people of Bolivia. Not only because of the economic benefit. It is tightly bound in their tradition, a ritual. It is thought that 90% of the population chew coca leaves. They stave off hunger, cold, pain. They reassure and provide nutrients and energy. They give the overworked a crutch, something sparkley to help you feel good.

Rewind to a silver mine in Potosi, the highest city in the world. We are shown the distressingly narrow mines by an ex-miner. We stoop then crawl into the hot tunnel, scarves protecting mouths from the asbestos dust, but due to the exertion at altitude we are all soon breathless and boiling, forced to remove the scarves in order to breathe. Greeted with a shaft that winds down further still, so narrow we have to wriggle on our bellies and i feel a rising panic. Get me out. NOW. Rushing backwards, I don{t care to look for the tiny rocks of silver with the others, i need fresh air in my lungs and sunlight on my face. We feel a hint of coolness and a see glimmer of light ahead. I run into the light and relief floods my lungs as i breathe easy once more.

The miners work 14 - 18 hour days in these conditions without food or water. We didn{t even go as far into the mines as they do - not even halfway and I was forced to turn back. Coca gets them through the day, eases the pain of their lives. The average life expecatancy is 40. And yet they continue - to ease the burden of their families poverty, each hoping that they will be the last miner in their family.

"My father coughed up blood, suddenly, his eyes started rolling. There was no warning. He died before he was 50. I can feel the lung disease too" he says, this ex-miner who spent 8 years down there before his command of English enabled him to become a tour guide. Saved by education.

In the coca museum we read a part of a poem referring to the coca legend. God said to the Andean people;

"Guard the leaves with much love and when you feel the sting of pain in your heart, hunger in your body and darkness in your mind, take them to your mouth and softly, draw up its spirit which is part of mine.

You will find love for your pain, food for your body and light for your mind.

But if your torturer, who come from the North, the white conqueror, the gold seeker should touch it, he will find in it only poison for his body and madness for his mind for his heart is as callous as his steel and iron garment.

And when the COCA, which is how you will call it, attempts to soften his feelings it will only shatter him. As the icy crystals born in the clouds crack the rocks, demolish mountains."

It will only shatter him. And that is exactly what cocaine does to Western Society. Crime, addiction, greed. A plant which so benefits one shatters another. I think of the zombies trooping into the daylight from Route 36, dazed, vacant and tasting the demolition.