BOTANTICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS VoL. 28, No. | 
MARCH 1980 
COCA IN THE NORTHWEST AMAZON 
RICHARD EVANS SCHULTES 
I. 
The perspicacity in knowledge of psychotropic plants amongst 
the Indians of the northwest Amazon is uncanny. Even taking 
into account the millenia of living in intimate association with 
his ambient vegetation and his thousands of opportunities to 
learn through trial and error — even considering these circum- 
stances, his achicvements at bending the properties of plants to 
his use are astonishing. 
There is little, however, that can compare with his use of the 
coca plant and its permeation into all of society and tribal 
customs. For throughout the northwestern Amazon, most Indian 
groups employ coca and have exalted it to a level never attained 
in the highland parts of the Andes, where its use has persisted 
from ancient times. 
Coca is widely cultivated in the western Amazon, especially in 
Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The type of coca cultivated in 
this vast region has been considered to represent a distinct 
variety: Erythroxylon Coca var. Ipadu.* Some investigators 
believe that the coca plant and the use of the leaves as a narcotic 
are recent introductions to the western Amazon from the 
Andean highlands. The existence of a distinct variety of E. Coca 
and the deep magico-religious role played by this plant and its 
product in the northwest Amazon, however, would seem to 
indicate an appreciable age of the plant in the region as well as 
an antiquity for its use as a sacred narcotic. 
*According to the International Rules of Botanical Nomenclature, the correct ortho- 
graphy of the generic name should be Erythroxylum, even though the word is Greek and 
not Latin. This has been pointed out by Plowman in Taxon 25 (1976) 141-144 and in 
Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University 27 (1979) 45-68. In this paper, 
nevertheless, I prefer to use the much more familiar and widely employed spelling 
Erythroxylon. 
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