Searching For Mama Coca

A Time-Traveler's Guide

Over a lifetime of study, I’ve found that everything anyone needs to know to grow medicinal Coca successfully and create to our own Coca Leaf medicines already exists in ancient books and journals. I’ve been delighted to find that when I listen closely I’m given far more than just “how-to” information through these still-living stories.

Mama Coca, as she once lived in the minds of people hundreds of years in the past, quite literally lives on today through their written words, and when we let them speak to us of their amazing insights and discoveries in her Andean mountains and highlands, they have wonderful things to tell.

Throughout this book you’ll hear the voices of long-ago explorers and adventurers, scientists and zealots, botanists and naturalists, doctors seeking miracles and entrepreneurs seeking profits, along with assorted winemakers, philosophers, shamans, poets and rogues of every sort. Through their stories, musings and observations you’ll gain diverse, personal perspectives into the long-disappeared worlds of the Coca Leaf medicines and Cocaine follies that grew from the European discovery of this sacred plant.

The ancient Andean Coca cultures come alive again through the eyes of those who experienced, and in some cases dedicated their lives to that world and then wrote down their experiences, reaching out to us in future generations.