Accounting for $1.5 billion in 2020, the cocaine drug market is the second largest illegal drug market in the world. It comes from Erythroxylum coca, a plant native to South America that local ...

Despite being the infamous raw material of the drug cocaine, very little is actually known about the coca plant and its wild relatives in the Andes mountains. Newsletters Games Share a News Tip.

For the coca plant, Levy sees opportunities on the supply side: Harbor gets the extract from a government-run company, and the only legal operator and producer of coca leaf in the world.

Biochemists have tried to map out how cocaine is made by the coca plant for more than a century, both because of its unique structure and for its uses in medicine, most recently as an anaesthetic.

According to the team, at least two preserved brains buried in a crypt near a 17th century hospital display evidence of the coca plant’s active components—cocaine, benzoylecgonine, and hygrine.

More information: Gaia Giordano et al, Forensic toxicology backdates the use of coca plant (Erythroxylum spp.) in Europe to the early 1600s, Journal of Archaeological Science (2024). DOI: 10.1016 ...