Volume 74 / Part 2 — PART II. (continued 2)

Of the chemical history of the coca leaf we are almost entirely ignorant. The narcotic principle it contains appears to be volatile and evanescent like that of the hemp plant. By keeping, the leaves gradually lose their smell and virtue, and after twelve months are generally considered worthless. We have found, that as they reach this country the leaves are coated with a resinous or waxy substance which is only sparingly soluble in water, but which ether readily dissolves. When digested in ether, the leaves give a dark green solution, which, on evaporation in the open air, leaves a brownish resin, possessed of a powerful, peculiar, and penetrating odour. By prolonged exposure to the air this resinous matter diminishes in quantity, and gradually loses the whole of its smell, leaving a fusible, nearly inodorous, matter behind. Ether, therefore, seems to extract at least two substances from the leaf, one of which is volatile, and has a powerful odour. It is probably in this volatile body that the narcotic qualities of the leaf reside. According to the French chemist, M. Fremy, the leaf contains besides a bitter principle, which dissolves in alcohol but not in ether, on which, as on the theine of tea, some of the virtues of the coca may depend. But the chemical and physiological properties of this substance have not yet been determined. A few pounds of fresh leaves, placed in the hands of a capable chemist, might soon furnish us not only with more chemical light, but probably also with some new and valuable remedial agents capable of producing medicinal effects hitherto beyond our reach.

If we attempt to explain, by the aid of the above modicum of chemical knowledge, the remarkable effects produced by the coca leaf, we utterly fail. How the mere chewing of one or two ounces of the leaves in a day, partly rejecting and partly swallowing the saliva,^[53] but wholly rejecting the chewed leaf—how this supports the strength, or can materially nourish the body in the ordinary acceptation of the term, we cannot understand. It cannot give much to the body; it must therefore act simply in preventing or greatly diminishing the ordinary and natural waste of the tissues which usually accompanies bodily exertion. As wine acts upon the nervous system of the aged so as to restrain the natural waste to a quantity which the now weakened digestion can readily replace, and thus maintains the weight of the body undiminished,—so it is probably with coca. In the young and middle-aged it lessens the waste of the tissues, and thus enables a smaller supply of food to sustain the weight and strength of the body. All these substances probably operate in a similar way to the partial absence of light, which, as is well known, causes the same amount of fattening food to go farther in increasing the weight of the body.

This explanation is only conjectural, and we hazard it only that some chemical physiologist, into whose hands the drug may fall, may by actual experiment test and amend it. Besides, we are aware that the explanation itself requires explanation; for how either wine or any other substance should have the effect described is by no means plain. At first sight it seems wholly irreconcilable with the received chemico-physiological doctrine, that the amount of muscular exertion is a measure of the waste of the tissues. We believe, however, that the apparent difficulty is, to a certain extent at least, capable of a purely chemical solution, but the discussion is unfit for this place.

This leaf resembles hemp in the narcotic quality of dilating the pupil, which opium does not possess. But in the proneness of the coca-eater to stillness and solitude we recognise an influence of this herb similar to that which opium exercises upon those who have experienced its highest enjoyments. “Markets and theatres,” says De Quincey, “are not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater, when in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment. In that state crowds become an oppression to him, music even too sensual and gross. He naturally seeks solitude and silence as indispensable conditions of those trances or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature. At that time I often fell into these reveries on taking opium; and more than once it has happened to me on a summer night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town of L—— at about the same distance, that I have sat from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move.”

This state resembles somewhat the abstracted condition in which the coquero reclines beneath the sheltering tree;—whether his apathy and phlegm ever approached to that of the coquero, the Opium-eater does not inform us.

We have no accurate data from which to form an estimate of the actual weight of coca leaf collected and consumed in Bolivia and Peru. Pöppig estimates the money value of the yearly produce to be about four and a half millions of Prussian dollars, which, at a shilling a pound, the price it yields to the grower, would make the annual produce nearly fifteen millions of pounds. This approximation is sufficient to show us its importance to the higher regions of South America, in an agricultural and commercial, as well as in a social point of view.

Dr Weddell, whose travels in Bolivia we noticed in a recent Number, informs us that the province of Yongas, in Bolivia, in which the coca is much cultivated, alone produces 9,600,000 Spanish pounds. The total produce, therefore, is probably much beyond the fifteen millions of pounds deduced from the statement of Pöppig. The importance of the plant to Bolivia is shown by another fact stated by Dr Weddell, that the revenue of the state of Bolivia in 1850 amounted to ten and a half millions of francs, of which nine hundred thousand, or one-twelfth of the whole, is derived from the tax on coca. Had he told us the amount of the tax per pound, we should have been able to approximate more nearly to the total produce of the state of Bolivia.

Here we close for the present our remarks upon this interesting class of bodies. There are still others, the effects of which are not less surprising, and which are indulged in by large masses of men, to the consideration of which we may hereafter return.

Meanwhile, with such attractive descriptions before him as the history of these narcotics presents, can we wonder that man, whose constant search on earth is after happiness, and who, disappointed here, hopes and longs and strives to fit himself for happiness hereafter—can we wonder that he should at times be caught by the tinselly glare of this corporeal felicity, and should yield himself to habits which, though exquisitely delightful at first, lead him finally both to torture of body and to misery of mind; that, debilitated by the excesses to which it provokes, he should sink more and more under the influence of a mere drug, and become at last a slave to its tempting seductions? We are indeed feeble creatures, and of little bodily strength, when a grain of haschisch can conquer, or a few drops of laudanum lay us prostrate; and how much weaker in mind, when, knowing the evils they lead us to, we cannot resist the fascinating temptation of these insidious drugs.

Note.—The writer of the above, and the previous article on Narcotics, assures the critics who have done him the honour to notice his remarks upon tobacco, that he is himself neither a smoker nor an opium-eater. To the kind old lady, Mrs Mary Smith, who has taken the trouble to write him from No. 195 Twelfth Street, New York, he begs to say, that he will be happy to receive the little volume, containing “the results of American experience on the use of tobacco,” and will endeavour to consider them with an unprejudiced mind.

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