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"The coca plant itself however is actually a wonderful medicine and fairly nourishing and something very different than the isolated and purified alkaloid cocaine. The use of coca leaves is not illegal in Peru and very important part of the culture in many locals. In some locales, the chewing of coca leaves is a personal R&R ritual, and no doubt much healthier for you than a drink or a smoke break.
In other locales, such as my home in the high Andes, coca chewing is more social and ritualized. My friends have sometimes searched through their entire bag of coca leaves to select the three most perfect leaves, which they have held in a little triad and offered to me with both hands."
"When the Spanish conquistadores seized power, coca was initially banned, as its ritual use and religious symbolism made coca both a symbol of paganism that the Catholic priests were fighting and a bonding element in the social structure that the new colonial rulers were dismantling."
(Cause dissent among the people, and don't let them have any fun together. That will dismantle their social structure. Is this the what that bitch Nancy Reagan had in mind with her "Just Say No" baloney?)
In 1551 the Bishop of Cuzco outlawed coca use, which became punishable by death, because coca was said to be "an evil agent of the Devil". Many other testimonies of the 16th century
associate the coca plant, coca use and ritual, with backwards paganism or devil worship.
Yet the tides turned as the physical benefits of this stimulant coca plant were discovered by colonial powers.
(The original war on drugs...and speed is bigger than ever. Including cocaine. You have to wonder, once again, are these stiflers for real this stupid, or are they so smart that they know to ban something is the fastest way to make it interesting?)
As the natives were turned into slaves working in the mines and fields of the colonial landlords, the interest of coca as a stimulant became obvious. Coca allowed workers to work longer, harder, and to eat less due to hunger suppressant qualities. More physical stamina was needed for the slave workers of the silver mines, so coca use was encouraged despite the initial condemnation of the practice by the Catholic church. Spanish King Philip II finally issued a decree recognizing coca use as essential to the well-being of the Andean native workers, but clearly urging missionaries to end its religious use. The Spanish colonial powers are thus believed to have effectively encouraged coca use by an increasing majority of the working population to increase their productivity and resistance to slave-like working conditions, yet is not clear wether this was a deliberately planned effort.
(Get the f outta here. Yeah, it was.)
Coca came to be cultivated even by the Catholic Church itself, which played an important role in colonial society and commerce. Coca leaves, once a privilege of the ruling class, were thus distributed three or four times a day to the workers during brief rest-breaks.
(Like coffee breaks. Once again the Catholic Church changes the rules to suit themselves. They do it ALL the TIME. How can anybody take them, or any Christian religion, seriously? What is their excuse for constantly caving in to acting like a business. A religion is NOT supposed to be a business. If a church is going to be a business, then it shouldn't be tax exempt.)
Since then, coca has been stigmatised, and associated to low-class, rural, native-American culture ( as opposed to the urban higher-class Spaniard descendants or the emerging hybrid mestizo middle class).
(Sounds so familiar.)
Chewing coca was and is still often seen as an uncivilised survivance of a despised pagan / “backwards” native culture, a symbol of rurality or of urban proletarianism. This historical association with slave / low-class poverty and manual labour survives to this day, and is important in understanding the politics of coca.
(Or understanding politics, at all.)
So here's the history of the coca leaves, very interesting reading:
In the eighties sometime the US got a bee in their bonnet about the coca leaves and pressured Peru into restricting Coca Leaves. Of course, just like weed, here in the USA, it was impossible and just caused mad problems and tons of poverty and violence (just like here, and just like prohibition.)
You kind of have to wonder who was it that invented crack. Who invented cocaine in the first place? In Peru they chewed the leaves to get them through the day, then over here coke becomes a nightclub drug. It's processed in a way that won't turn your teeth green, and it's a nice boost of energy.
There's a new drug, as usual there are people who are going to overdo it, and overdo it alone since it's all stigmatized (as is anything which might cause you to feel too good) and people will die. People die from too much fat, booze, sugar, and cigarettes, but all that is legal, so I really don't see the "public good" coming from making things illegal because they are a drug which will kill you. The violence is pretty much always caused by the fact that the stuff is illegal. Even the domestic violence is always caused be the fact that the drugs are expenseive and hard to get and dangerous and if you get caught there goes the rent money. Or maybe some women is nagging her man that he didn't save her any so he pops her one. If drugs were easier to get, you wouldn't have all these squabbles.
So what I wonder, is where did "bath salts" come from and is it a coincidence that we all of a sudden have this wacky drug that makes you so crazy and paranoid you're going to kill people. The face-eater is still NOT confirmed to have been on bath salts, but great hysteria causing rumor by the way, much like the ones about LSD in the eighties...I always thought being an adult would be so great, but it's just as bad as high school. Bunch of fake-ass bullshit, the people in charge are mostly idiots, nobody knows what they're doing, and good looking women are simultaneously revered and hated. Pretty or ugly, they are never taken seriously until they flip out, and then they are still not taken seriously because it's "hormones."
As far as men go...Mitt Romney? Seriously? If that Ken Doll of a fuck-tard becomes our president I WILL move to Canada. I know Americans (including myself, believe me: guilty guilty guilty) can be the laziest and stupidest, most complacent, willfully ignorant buck-passers on Earth, but we can't be this lazy and stupid. Bad enough they tried to shove that Alaskan chick down our throats.
No amount of Prozac is going to mask that that guy is a retard. Maybe worse than Bush. He's cut from the same cookie cutter as Bush. It will be more of the same insanity. Obama didn't do everything right, but at least he seems like a real person. That's one thing the religious psychos can't seem to fake: humanity.
and...
Are "bath salts" and privatized prisons both emerging at the same time a coincidence, or is this a way to fill the prisons just like the prison pushers promised they would be full? That's what I'd like to know.
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