A Geographical Perspective on Coca/Cocaine Impacts in South America

Abstract

Coca is the common name of a shrub, Erythroxylum coca, domesticated millennia ago in the Andes Mountains of South America. Its leaves are picked and transformed into various products, one of which is cocaine. The result is to spatially link the locations of coca cultivation in South America to the places in the world where demand for cocaine exists. There are only a handful of plants that directly affect both the welfare of millions of people and the world economy, including food species such as rice, wheat, and maize. The two globally significant plants that are transformed into important illicit drugs are poppy and coca. In this essay, I present a geographical perspective on the negative impacts associated with the latter.