Plants of the Gods S8E5: The Ethnobotany of Coca with Dr. Wade Davis

And I think it's really important, Mark, you know, I've called for the, we use the word not legalization, liberate the plant from the tyranny of injustice that's shackled it for so long.

And this is not a trivial endeavor.

There are 250,000 families in Colombia that grow coca to survive.

We need to give them a legal market.

That won't eliminate the presence or the terror of the cartels, but it will at least give an option.

Secondly, with the taxes that can be generated from transforming this remarkable product into an international commodity, we can give countries like Colombia the tax revenue to help pay the cost of peace, having drained their treasuries for decades to pay for a sordid conflict that would not have lasted a day without the profits of prohibition.

And so there's a very important geopolitical reason.

There's also a kind of a trans-Latin cultural reason.

I mean, coca is the greatest gift of South America.

And it's a gift that has been consistently not just denied, but demonized.

I mean, if we step back, and I could say to you, Mark, I've got something that you can take every day.

and you won't really notice anything except at the end of the day you've realized you've stayed at your desk a little bit more contented, a little bit more productive, capable of focusing without getting distracted and going to the refrigerator, and without sort of grabbing a coffee that just makes your stomach turn over.

And at the end of the day, with a kind of a lightness of being, you look down and you find that you've been more productive than you've ever been before, and you can go home at night just wondering about that, have your dinner with your family and take a run, I don't know, go watch a movie, whatever one does, get up in the morning and do it again, and suddenly on the day two you're just as productive.

And all of this is thanks to the benefits of a sacred plant that has been used with no evidence of anything but benign features for 8,000 years by virtually every civilization and culture in the history of South America.

Wouldn't that be an interesting thing? And of course, that's what we are arguing, that this is a planet that not only should not be demonized, its benefits should not be denied, not just to people of Latin America, but to all people everywhere.