For most of human civilization, the earth’s natural bounty of plants, shrubs and trees have helped lift the spirits of the sad, hungry and sick. But in our modern world, infected with the double epidemics of European Judeo-Christianity and Savage Capitalism, there have been other plants who have attached themselves to some bizarre love-hate representations. Those plants have always maintained their beauty and potency; rather, the sickness resides inside of the Euro-Colonial mindset, which has manipulated and twisted the plant images.
Some unfortunate plants from the exotic Asia-Orient have received some strident Euro-controls throughout recent history, such as Cannabis Sativa, (THC-Hemp), Papaver Somniferum, (Opiates), Camellia Sinensis, (Tea), and Saccharum Officinarum, (Sugar Cane).
In the Americas, originally populated with savage ‘Indians,’ and later exterminated en masse through European Savage Colonialism, Euro-criminals have strenuously manipulated two particular plant varieties: Nicotiana Tabacum, (Nicotine), and Erythroxylum Coca, (Coca leaves-Cocaine).
What decade was it? On the Inca Tawantinsuyu Four Regions Cosmology or the Spanish Gregorian Christian Calendar? For us historians it was the decade of the 1630s – a cold and nasty one – and especially for the mitas. This mita group were all young men from the scattered regions of the Andes. These were peasant stock, farmer people, but they lost the war against the Spanish European invaders, back around the 1570s, so they had to supply a tributo, or tribute-tax. to the Spanish colonial state – and they had to give away their lives too.
There they stood on that cold and wet day in the early morning of summer; tired, forlorn and silent on a brownish-green patched, rocky ledge that overlooked the pit of evil, a city called Potosi, very high up in the clouds of the mountains. The gods looked down on the pathetic worker slaves that willingly ventured into the mountainous pit. Spanish royal fortunes totally relied on this one mine pit – filled with the silver lode.
The Kings of Spain needed the silver mint for their reales, or silver coinage, in order to finance the Habsburg wars across seventeenth-century Europe. The worker slaves knew that most of them would die inside of the mine monster.
Over the years, fewer native slave laborers showed up for the mita, and so the Spanish imported, kidnapped ‘royal slaves’ from Africa to do the nasty work. All of the miners, slave and non-slave, could grab a little silver for themselves, called a partida, but who could survive inside the belly of the tortured mountain? The mountain had to vomit frequently, and it often spewed the human meat of mitayo, or mita worker, African slave and the contracted miners of all ethnicities that risked it all for some pieces of silver.
The Spanish colonial authorities began to worry about fifty years previously. How do we get the native mitayos to work for their own bad deaths inside of the belly of the Potosi Monster? Catholicism couldn’t do it – but a local variety of plant might do the job.
The Catholic priests hated this plant, but a measly 30 pieces of silver would always trump Faith under the human condition. The Spanish noticed that the native Andean farmers functioned on the code of reciprocity. When a visitor entered a rural home, he or she often brought the infamous coca leaves as gifts. The Spanish often did the same when invited into another person’s house – except the Spanish brought wine.
This coca leaf was truly a gift from the Gods. Natives also used the coca leaves during the religious festivals of the Incan Empire. What was it about this coca leaf that the local natives prized so much?
Coca Leaf when chewed or used as a tea infusion immediately imparted a swift zest of energy. The plant relieved hunger, and helped fight against minor physical and mental pains. Locals felt better after chewing on the leaves and it even aided in sexual relations when working as an aphrodisiac.
Coca also alleviated altitude sickness, depression, loose bowels, nausea, and improved one’s circulation. Native farmers often felt the second wind of work coming on after enjoying the coca tea.
The Spanish colonial authorities had realized that coca worked better than the imported sugar cane plant from Asia, and it functioned even better than the American mate plant found in Paraguay, also taken as a tea. Coca had transformed into the ultimate stimulant drug.
The King of Spain encouraged the growth of the coca plant. Coca plantations produced high volumes of those small green leaves. In order to entice the mitas to kill themselves for the Spanish King, the Spanish guards freely gave copious amounts of coca leaves to the worker slaves who entered the dark, cold, humid mines of Potosi. Even at the point of death through exhaustion, the mitayos kept chewing on the coca. The Spanish even discovered that with the higher altitude of cultivation, the more concentration of coca in the leaf. The Spanish had found a winner. And still to this day, the greatest number of European Cocaine users have been the Spanish.
The added chemicals of sulfuric acid and hydrochloride solution created the addictive solution, called Cocaine. The Coca plant has become the most powerful stimulant drug in the modern world, while no other global-cultivated plant even comes close to it, such as Sugar Cane, Chocolate beans, Nicotine leaves, Tea leaves or Coffee beans.
This plant has given new life to the hurting, confused and tired, and yet European colonialism transferred the coca plant into the cocaine concoction, all in order to transform themselves into Nietzschean super humans. At least their minds told them so.
High powered financial advisers, corporate attorneys, expensive doctors, intelligence operatives, rock musicians-music producers, Hollywood Industry-Media types and other ego maniacs have embraced this drug, while the poorer elements, or capitalist society’s losers, smoke the cheaper, real diluted stuff, called Crack, and who often end up homeless, pathetic, or slowly die in a prison cell.
This Euro-colonial monstrosity took off in the late nineteenth-century. From the 1850s to the 1900s, European colonial powers transferred the cultivation of this American plant across the globe, and especially in Africa and Asia. The Dutch colonials established massive plantations of coca leaf and coffee beans on the island of Java. The British established imperial plantations of coca and tea leaves on the island of Ceylon. German Pharmaceutical Companies, such as Merck, established the first marketing of Cocaine.. Even the Japanese colonial empire entered the coca game with coca plantations on the island of Formosa-Taiwan.
An Austrian chemist by the name of Neumann first used the term of Kokain with his mixtures of hydrochloric acid. In the 1870s, a Corsican businessman marketed the first Cocaine drink, a wine called Vin Mariani. Sigmund Freud, the great psychobabble intellectual, also lauded the drug as a great help for ‘psychologically damaged’ patients.
In the 1880s, the American Coca Cola Company, marketed a non-alcoholic beverage that mixed Cocaine, caffeine and sugar syrup, and today, fructose corn syrup. If a regular American citizen tries to re-enter the US with coca leaves, he or she will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison. But this is not true with the corporate conglomerate of Coca Cola, which still maintains its corporate privileges in importing coca leaves into the United States. The US pharmaceutical Parke-Davis also has corporate rights in using coca leaves.
Around 1900, the Eugenics movement grew exponentially, and so did the Anti-Drug US empire. The concern of course centered around lower class fiend use, especially Black Jazz musicians and Latino degenerates coming up from Latin America. The Amerikan Empire introduced the Harrison Act of 1915 that prohibited Opium-Heroin and Cocaine use. Due to this prohibition in the 1920s, a US pharmaceutical company introduced the synthetic substitute of Cocaine, called Novocaine.
After WW II, the Amerikan Empire moved into a greater offensive against the Coca Leaf, including the Nicotine Leaf, the Cannabis Leaf and the Poppy plant. The Empire even forced the United Nations to move against Coca in 1960s.
Yet the same Amerikan Empire forged a strange alliance during the 1980s. The US government wanted to desperately overthrow the Sandinista Leftist government in Nicaragua. The CIA set up the Contra terrorist network that murdered supposed Sandinista supporters in the countryside, but even this tactic did not work so well.
Congress cut off the funding, so the Reagan administration used the Iran-Contra network, to sell arms to a supposed enemy, Iran, in order to fund the Contra terrorists. Meanwhile, the US favored the other side of the Iran-Iraq War, representing Saddam Hussein. But there was another part of the evil plan. the Contra leaders also wanted some profits, so they began to deal in drugs, like the US supported Kuomintang terrorists during the 1950s, and the US supported, northern tribal terrorists in Indochina during the 1970s.
The Contra-narco drug lords produced a cheap substitute in place of the expensive Cocaine, called Crack. The user could smoke the stuff easily and the high was shorter than the Coke high, so the user had to use more of the stuff in order to feel the same ego high of ‘blow,’ or snorting Cocaine powder. By the late 1980s, the Crack explosion hit the streets. Young gangsta tough guys now tried to sell the magic smoke.
Those working class dealers failed to understand the depravity of the US government or the Amerikan Empire. Also at the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union power base. The Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was officially over.
One of the players in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal, the vice-president, Bush I, was running for president. The Amerikan Empire needed another enemy to exterminate after the Cold War. The generals and spies in the US Military-Spy-Industrial Complex were getting nervous. The vice president candidate thereby used the Drug War for the next round of destruction.
The domestic prison population grew exponentially, and especially among African-Americans and Latinos. Even tiny amounts of Crack could give some victim a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence in prison! This same sociopath would soon turn on their man in Iraq, Saddam, and start even another genocidal war in order to end, ‘the Vietnam Syndrome.’ His son, Bush II, would really finish the job in that region of the world.
The next president continued the repression of the Drug War against American citizens, and with even greater sanctions against Welfare recipients. African-American neighborhoods got hit brutally with this new US government financed war. With hardcore gentrification increasing in the 1990s, old Black neighborhoods began to rot from the inside out, and the American system shoved the displaced African-Americans between the Supermax prisons and the poorer suburbs. The luckier ones joined the US military.
This same president then instituted Plan Colombia, which used the same paramilitary tactics during the previous Contra War, but this time against the Leftists guerrillas in Colombia. The Amerikan Empire murdered over 30,000 Nicaraguans during its Contra War of the 1980s, but lately, the Amerikan Empire has murdered over 250,000 Colombians using the Colombian state and its paramilitary henchmen.
Another part of Plan Colombia forces the Colombian government to spray chemicals against coca plant fields inside the country. Strangely, cocaine production is still a very profitable business. The real agricultural murder has actually targeted native, Afro-Colombian and other Colombian farmers. Colombia now has the largest internal refugee population in the Americas. The Colombian-narco oligarchy wants their lands – for greater coca production – with the continued help of the sociopaths that run the Amerikan Empire.
Here we have the strange legacy of the coca leaf. At one time, it was the sacred herb for chewing, tea ceremonies, religious rites and community relations in the Andean world. Thanks to European colonialism and mass murder however, the sacred herb became the egotist drug of choice for the European invaders and manipulators.
The US government now uses the coca leaf as a decoy for its murderous foreign policy objectives. Meanwhile, millions of young people of color putrefy inside the Amerikan Imperial Prison-Gulag. They have lost their lives and their dignity due to dabbling with the powdered leaf. And finally, a protective class of coca users, mostly music and media artists, while sharing white skin privilege with money to burn, still enjoy the fine sniffs of concocting, cocaine-infused ego magic.
Only Euro-Colonial, Imperial Evil could do so much damage to a nifty little plant found in the Andean mountains.
Guns and Anarchy 