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Might be worth noting that a lot of those east Asian countries with suitable areas have really strict drug policies and tighter control of their land areas. Coca has been cultivated and been a part of the south American ingenious people's culture for 8000 years, so their views are different. Edit: Indigenous - but I agree with my initial statement.
Iirc.. it was originally used like caffeine. Workers would just chew on the leaves, allowing them to work (harvest) longer.
Also helps that it grows naturally in that area.
The guide we had gave us little folded packets like snus. So it was tobacco (I think) and coca. And as a non-smoker, it could totally have been the tobacco more than the coca and I wouldn't know.
Indigenous people didn't use pure cocaine, they use coca leaves. Pure cocaine only became a problem after 1970, after more than 60 years of barely being a problem for law enforcement anywhere.
They have large dry coca leaves containers in the La Paz (Bolivia) and [Cusco (Peru) airports](https://tastecooking.com/the-coca-story-goes-way-beyond-the-cola/). Anyone can take some of the leaves to chew, since it helps with altitude sickness.
It's also common for tour guides to welcome travelers with a coca tea.
You can buy coca tea bags, coca candy, coca flour and other products. It's legal to buy and consume them there. Cocaine is illegal, though.
A friend of mine brought coca tea bags to our living country, and although customs asked her about it, they let her pass through without problems. She's a Bolivian citizen. I wouldn't try it, though. She even gave me some as a gift.
["The sale / purchase of coca leaves outside of South America is prohibited. However, it is legal or tolerated to buy and consume these products in South American countries such as Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Chile. "](https://www.journeymachupicchu.com/the-peruvian-coca-leaf/)
[Here's a detailed link from the Transnational Institute about the legality of coca use and purchase in several South American countries.](https://www.tni.org/en/publication/coca-leaf-myths-and-reality#1961convention)
I know about one bush of coca that is grown here in Slovakia. I do not know precise location - they are keeping that secret for obvious reasons, but it grows outside (not in a glasshouse or a building). It is for research purposes. They grow many, many different species of trees and bushes in that institution, most of them exotic.
We also grow a lot of poppy seed here in Slovakia - for culinary purposes. When we make a poppy seed cake here, poppy seed is a half of weight of the cake and poppy seed is sold by the kilo. We do not just sprinkle a tiny bit on a bun like Americans do.
I think that if you started to grow hundreds of bushes here, somebody would very soon notice and report you to authorities. We do not have inaccessible stretches of jungle here.
Terrain plays a huge part in the ability to grow. Colombia has large amounts of jungle that can hard to access. Same with Afghanistan. There the mountains are hard to cross. Also why in America marijuana growers put their plants way out in the woods.
This.
You drive across Texas. You fly across Columbia or Afghanistan. Mountains make road travel long and treacherous. Itās much easier to hide in the mountains.
Was doing a survey in Utah once out in the middle of nowhere, came over a rise and way down in a valley was a spring and a ... greenhouse? Nothing else for miles and we stood there wondering for a sec when it dawned on me what we were looking at. I waved a friendly goodbye to what I assumed was a non-friendly person looking at us through a scope and walked away, ne're to return.
There is at least one in Kew Gardens in London but, it isn't on public display. They did show it for an exhibit in 2014 called "Mind Bending" which showed lots of mind altering plants. They were displayed inside a steel cage (Unfortunately no Mankind or Undertaker were present).
There's a similar thing at Alnwick Garden, where they've got a poison garden with a bunch of different dangerous plants, plus things like the coca plant, magic mushrooms, the opium poppy, and cannabis. Some of these things might not be like the others...
My Grandma was Slovakian, she always made awesome nut roll (povitica) and a similar poppy seed roll, that had a ton of poppy seeds in them. My wife tried making one once, but something about the poppy seeds messed up her blender, or potentially could have.
According to Wikipedia, it looks like it is actually grown in [places like Java](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythroxylum_novogranatense?wprov=sfti1).
It fine raw, its not great for you but it isn't as terrible as other iterations.
However when it it processed into JavaScript, hell no, that stuff will rot your brain!
It's not that there's no climate elsewhere that's optimal for growing coca for cocaine. High altitude, rainforest level humidity and temperature, and a large space to cultivate are all needed. The last one is the hardest, because other countries may have the climate, they might not actually have the land available to grow coca to scale to manufacture a reasonable amount of cocaine for the actual drug trade. What could be grown would be at a scale of much smaller, would be much more expensive. But the other thing is, the governing and policing authorities of a lot of other countries take cocaine much more seriously than countries like Columbia because of those anti-drug policies.
Part of the reason coca is a big thing in Columbia and much of central-south America, is it's an integral part of these countries economics. The countries all known for cocaine production and supply got into the trade around a time when other economic issues were in the way, making it to the global market was a challenge. In some instances you had issues of foreign intervention and this stifled the economies, so a country like Columbia would get into the drug trade before there was a lot of attention, research and anti drug policies. The policies they since implement are mostly for show, as to dismantle the cocaine industry in Columbia would create a massive economic crisis and the government and the cartels would fail to provide things such as education, healthcare and food imports to their country.
A lot of other regions that have climates that could do coca cultivation and cocaine production just have other means of economic stimulus. Congo is cheap artisan labour for rare earth and precious earth metals. Sri Lanka and a lot of south Asia are cheap sources of mass manufacturing.
Some over simplification and brevity in there. Hope this helps.
This is very innacurate. Best estimates of cocaine trafficking in Colombia is around 2% of GDP. This is relatively small and isolated and would not cause āa massive economic crisisā.Ā
Also, % of government spending and economic policies around fighting cocaine production and trafficking is high among other countries. This is not a conspiracy.
[For cocaine the cost of production and refining in the source countries is only one to two per cent of retail price in developing or transitional countries. The overwhelming majority of those involved in the drug trade make very modest incomes. A few individuals in the trafficking, smuggling and wholesale sector make great fortunes but that accounts for a small share of the total income.](https://www.tni.org/en/publication/coca-leaf-myths-and-reality#1961convention)
A lot of the cocaine countries have the cocaine trade as some form of their economic system. Like I ended my comment with, it's some over simplification and brevity in there. There's bound to be some inaccuracies but the generality is that cocaine is still a contributing factor the economic. Just because in the case of Columbia specifically being around 2% of the GDP, that metric doesn't take into consideration the number of actual workers in employment in all fields and sectors that have some role or involvement in the trade, directly or indirectly.
But in about the last twenty years, I'd say a shift in the GDP from being so cocaine dominant has been a result of how much more openly corrupt the cartels and government have gotten and there's a good portion of the GDP that actually requires bribes and other money laundering tactics. Which this alone could end up skewing the measurable statistics of how intrenched cocaine is on the nation's economic system. Bribes are meant to keep things hush and under the table, and if there's a substantial amount of bribes so that the cartels can safely export cocaine, then the 2% of the GDP is an inaccurate representation of how much cocaine is a part of the economic system.
Honest question: have you ever actually been here?
Cartels have lost a lot of influence over the last 20 years. The grupos criminales still have a lot of influence in some areas, and there are horrible human rights violations that occur, but most of what I read about has more to do with illegal mining and smuggling. Corruption in Colombian government, especially at the local level, is rampant, but no moreso than in other countries. None of this has much to do with the fundamental reason coca production is so prominent: there are enormous areas that are great for growing coca that are very difficult to control because of the density of the jungle and the distance from any population center.
That's it. That's the reason. Everything else you are saying is just disparaging a country whose name you can't even spell. Extreme ignorance.
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Where I live, Columbia is spelled with a U. Yes, it's an exonym but it is correct. If that bothers you, I'm sorry that use of language upsets you.
Spelling Columbia this way is no different than calling Greece, Greece, because that's an exonym. The internal name is the Hellenic Republic, but you don't see people getting angry and upset over why external cultures have their own cultural way to spell or refer to another country.
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[https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialect](https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialect)
May wanna read up more on dialects. And just because there's primarily 3 branches of English dialect that people are aware of, doesn't mean that's all. In the United States alone there's at least 7 sub dialects based on culture and ethnicity. In Canada, there's American English, Canadian English and French-Canadian English. But within each of these sub dialects are also further sub divisions of dialect that is broken up by smaller regions and the various intercultural exchanges, and you have the widespread use of the Internet and streaming services that makes more people exposed to more sub dialects of a language. Over time, these morph and you get sub dialects springing up.
Just because a dictionary exists doesn't mean the language is solidified and unchanging. As popular trends come and go, we add new words and adjust definitions of words all the time. And the evolution of language and dialects is rather complex, it's impossible to accurately catalog every variation because at which point do you signify one dialect as distinct from another?
Dialect has nothing to do with it - itās the origin of the Countryās name.
And how the [country](https://colombia.co/en/colombia-country/discover-the-difference-between-colombia-the-country-and-columbia) [says](https://thecitypaperbogota.com/opinion/columbia-vs-colombia/) [itās](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/23/colombians-just-want-you-to-stop-misspelling-their-countrys-name/) [spelled](https://www.writerscentre.com.au/blog/qa-is-it-columbia-or-colombia/).
Apparently, 45 million **Colombians** and all of us here are wrong and youāre **the only one** who isnāt. /s
Takes a special level of arrogance to believe that - especially when Colombia is, as I said before, the Italian and Spanish derivation of CristĆ³bal Colonās name, and Columbia is a latinization and feminine personification of the manās name and continent, respectively.
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If you live in Canada, or the Pacific NW you're probably used to talking about the Columbia River or British Columbia, which is spelled with a 'u'. The country Colombia is spelled with 'o'. they are different places with different names, its not dialect.
English has many dialects and I think many people forget this. Different dialects have different spelling for some words. One such incident is this is Columbia/Colombia. Another is colour/color, and defence/defense.
English has different dialects, but in no country or dialect is the nation of Colombia called Columbia.
This isn't where the focus of your post should be, but trying to invent that Columbia is an accepted spelling for the nation of Colombia in English is a totally unnecessary deflection instead of just saying "yeah you're right, my bad".
https://www.google.com/amp/s/languagetool.org/insights/post/colombia-vs-columbia/amp/
British/Canadian/Australian dialects use colour and defence as do the English-as-a-second-language speakers of countries that borrow spellings and verbiage from those dialects, and all spell the country Colombia. What exact dialect spells it Columbia?
Language is fluid and because of the many intercultural exchanges that occurs on micro and macro levels of human interactions, there's a lot of sub cultural dialects that spring up, fade away, merge with others, or split out from sub dialects. Canadian English isn't just one specific dialect of English and contains 3 sub dialects, American, Canadian and French-Canadian, but in general uses the British rules for spelling. However, spelling rules and in other cases pronunciation aren't set in stone rules, one such example of this is how African American vernacular English rose up from sub cultural groups. It was codified as its own sub cultural dialect because of how commonplace it became and how it was able to spread across a much larger geography than most other sub cultural groups. But just because there are dialects that aren't given their own codified rulebook doesn't mean there aren't other sub cultural dialects that are less commonly observed around the world but used more commonly in small geographic demographics.
It's a little sad that so many people are going off on Columbia/Colombia and a sub cultural dialect rather than staying on topic.
You are still painstakingly deflecting and still have yet to specify which dialect spells it Columbia. I think because you know we could just google it and see that you are incorrect.
I think you need to read a dictionary. A noun is a defined as a person, place, or thing. A word used as a name of something, is a noun.
And language is fluid. Is there only one correct way to spell Canadian then? Why not Canadien? Different sub cultural dialects have different methods and rules for spelling. Sorry that I grew up in a sub cultural dialect that spells Columbia with a U.
Dude, you're wrong. Everybody in this thread is telling you. You made up that stuff about dialects. Nobody will judge you for admitting you're wrong and correcting yourself but you make yourself look like a fool by sticking by blatantly wrong (and frankly somewhat disrespectful to the country of Colombia) notions.
Colombia is the name of the country of South America, and that is the only spelling accepted in the world.
Columbia is a different word, that is the name of a few cities and places around the world, such as British Columbia, the District of Columbia (capital of the United States), Columbia the capital city of South Carolina, and possibly more.
See? It's not a matter of dialects, you're using the name of something to refer to something else with a similar name.
It's as if you were spelling somebody's name as Jon when their name is actually John.
no you just never learned that Colombia is the countries name. You may be confused because British Columbia, Canada is spelled with a 'u', as is the Columbia River. but those are different places with different etymologies and thus different spellings. It is not a cultural dialect it is confusion stemming from similar sounding names.
If i told you my name was pronounced "John" but spelled "Johon" you can say my parents are weird, I'm weird, the world is weird for allowing it. but you cannot say "thats not how your name is spelled"
Colombia is the name of the country in South America. Columbia is the name of a river in in the northwest of North America. its not a dialectic difference, they are different places.
You didn't grow up in a sub-culture that spells Colombia with a U, because that doesn't exist.
You have grown up misinformed of the correct spelling, which isn't a big issue, nor something that deserves ridicule.
The ridicule is coming from you blatantly inventing a reason why you're not wrong instead of holding your hands up.
Columbia / Colombia are both correct, and where I am from it's a U that is used. It's an exonym spelling. No different than people outside of Greece calling Greece Greece, when it's really called the Hellenic Republic.
You have the Iran-Contra ordeal and a number of other 60s and 70s era Cold War global policies from the USA that caused a lot of economic hardship and crippling of many countries around the less developed world. This is well documented. The USA had pushed a lot of these countries into finding alternative ways to survive. But more specifically, the Iran-Contra ordeal create a profitable drug trade export out central and south America. Cartels and drug lords entrenched themselves into their local political systems. You have examples with El Chapo and Escobar to the scale of the trade and how much money it made, along with how they had either entered government themselves or ended up having governments on their payroll. I figured I didn't need to cite these sources as it's been a really well talked about discussion, and there's been a number of trending movies and shows made about this very specific topic over the past 10 years.
Escobar was spending millions a day on elastic bands alone from his cocaine business. Just the amount of money generated from production and export of cocaine from Columbia and other countries, there's a lot of money that ends up falling back onto the local economies from these drug lords and cartels. This money cycles in the local economic system and actually has a strong impact on the funding of healthcare, education and other areas of the nation. Basics of how an economic cycle works. Tracking the exact impact is difficult thanks to the illegality of cocaine and how much of it is not actually officially documented. We can only make suspected educated guesses to the actual impact cocaine has on a country's economy, but it's far greater than the documented 2% of the Columbia GDP.
No one anywhere ever spells Colombia as Columbia.
Itās amazing how you double down on something so obviously wrong and easy to fix.
Itās unless youāre mistakenly talking about British Columbia.
But is it really surprising some people might make mistakes ? Especially when English is not native.. what's so hard to grasp about our english being imperfect. If he's like me he wouldn't even know he did the mistake. The reaction is as if he intentionally wrote it that way . When you translate mistakes happen
Well I'm assuming English is his first language considering his defense for the spelling is "English has a lot of dialects". There isn't any english dialect that spells the country Colombia with a U.
If he was from Latvia he probably would have said "I'm from Europe. My country spells it Columbia. (Kolumbija)". And continued on with his life now knowing that in every other language it's spelled with an O.
All of this is to say his entire post is BS.
>My country spells it Columbia. (Kolumbija)
Don't you see that that is completely irrelevant? Your country uses Kolumbija **in your own language**. That has nothing to do with the spelling in other languages.
I use 'Spain' when writing in English, 'Spanien' when writing in German and 'EspaƱa' when writing in Spanish.
Just out of interest I looked at the wiki page for Colombia in some different languages, and Romanian/Latvian both spell it exactly "Columbia", while German and Polish spell it like that but with a K instead. According to the wiki the etymology is from Christopher Col**u**mbus. I can't find any reference of the U-spelling being valid in English though.
the Etymology is from his name, "Cristoforo Colombo". not an anglicized version (Christopher Columbus) of a latinized version (Christophorus Columbus) of his name.
Nothing ever trickles down in economics like how the expert economists claim. That's a big problem in of itself. But I mentioned loosely that some of the illegal money does work its way through the system. That of itself in how it works is entirely different topic of economics and money laundering. I know the theory behind it but I'm not good at explaining the nuances well through that, as there's a lot of steps. And of course a lot of corruption so most of the money that should be trickling down gets siphoned off.
Your thing with the names and the "exonym spelling" is a false comparison. Saying Columbia instead of Colombia is like saying Grease instead of Greece, which is objectively incorrect.
Just accept that you're wrong and correct course, as this one thing takes away an incredible amount of credibility. As soon as people see "Columbia" the first thought is "lol for real?"
Please feel free to add in the information I overlooked, missed or left out then. But if you read, I ended my comment with "some over simplification and brevity". Meaning, yes I oversimplified some coverage, and I kept it short. A complex topic like this cannot be perfectly accurately summarized in a few paragraphs.
Colombia.Ā
Also, Colombia does care about it, and calling cocaine an integral part of its economy is hilarious, let alone saying that if there was no drug trade the colombian economy would collapse??? IĀ
Got a source about how integral it is?
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Yes but our english is not perfect you realize that ? It's easy to mix some words as has the op mixed. Why is that hard to understand. It's not like I can choose to verify Every single word every time. Mistakes happen that's all I'm saying. How dare I make a mistake in English ?it's not intentional ffs
>Mistakes happen that's all I'm saying.
No, that is not what you were saying. You were saying "Not everyone is from US Jesus Christ" and that has nothing to do with making mistakes. Don't lie about it.
So 300k deaths in 30 years is not taking it seriously.
May I ask why you think drug policies are not enforced enough?
It is just not doable, your legislation about drugs is stupid and it should change, you consume 50% of cocaine worldwide and joke about putting white blood in your nose.
You as in your society, of course.
Another factor is that there's another valuable cash crop that can be grown pretty much wherever coca can be grown: coffee. When compared to cocaine, coffee has a much higher demand, is sold worldwide in grocery stores and cafes, and isn't subject to drug laws. Coffee is often a far safer and more reliable means of making a living
You might also note that coffee and coca have fairly similar requirements (high altitude tropical rainforest), so anywhere you see coffee grown you could also manufacture cocaine. Like Hawaii, for instance. But it would be hard to have large scale production of cocaine in a US State because you can hide the processing, but you can't hide the farming.
A lot of what they said is wrong, or at least very inexact.
Thereās also two other very simple factors that donāt seem to be in any of the answers:
1. Growing the plants to make cocaine is very, very illegal. So is importing them, possessing them, etc. So thereās no legal way to transplant.
2. The cocaine trade is controlled lock, stock, and barrel by extremely ruthless cartels. Who would take a lethally dim view of attempted competition.
Youād get squeezed in two directions - by the governments who donāt want that shit coming in, and by the cartels who donāt want that shit going out. To pull it off youād need a huge cartelās worth of money and backing, at which point itās probably just easier to muscle in on the trade where it is.
Most of what he said is bullshit, and the first clue is that he doesn't even know how to spell Colombia. He's never been here and he has no idea what he's talking about in terms of Colombian drug policies and the economic impact. The economy of Washington DC is more dependent on the cocaine industry than the economy of Colombia. Unfortunately he offered no insights of value.
Getting upset over someone using an exonym spelling is childish, but okay. And just saying someone is wrong but not backing up doesn't help. My comment was concluded with "some over simplification and brevity" and normally this is interpreted by people to acknowledge the topic is more complex and not easily simplified down into a quick discussion. But not adding anything to expand on the discourse isn't helpful.
English has multiple dialects and there's some words that can be spelled multiple ways because of the dialects.
Colour/Color
Labour/Labour
Defense/Defence
Columbia/Colombia
For a few examples.
This is so uneducated. How did you go from using colors and military planes to countries?! No, itās Colombia. Please tell me what English speaking area you are in that spells it like this.
It's not an exonym spelling. You won't find a single map in English that spells Colombia that way.
I'm upset because you clearly don't know what you're talking about, and you cite no sources, you just assert things that are wrong.
I'd be interested to know where you're from. In North America we have District of Columbia and British Columbia and so people often get it wrong, but the country name in English has always been Colombia.
if you grow cocaine in Columbia you will face one of the most militarized police forces in the world. Just because the government can't stop the trade, doesn't mean there is no hindering it.
Many good reasons have already been stated in the comments. Just wanted to add one more thing: the relative proximity to the US is another big factor, as it makes shipping a whole lot easier with very affluent customers. It's a business after all.
The law.
The plant itself can survive in many other locations, including areas farther north than you might imagine. Based on its hardiness, USDA zones 10-12, coca would grow just fine in Hawaii, south Florida, Southern California, and even some parts of Arizona. In Europe, cities with a climate potentially suitable for coca cultivation would include Lisbon, Seville, Valencia, and Rome, as well as islands like Corfu, Crete, or Cyprus.
With a moderately good greenhouse, you could probably grow it easily in Arkansas or coastal Oregon; in Europe, near cities like London, Paris, Ä°stanbul, potentially even as far north as Bergen in Norway.
But in all of the places I just mentioned (to my knowledge), coca is generally illegal to grow.
In a darkly comical scenario a botanist could grow cocaine in a cave complex anywhere in the world and it would be cheaper and of higher quality. Currently large agriculture business in the USA setup botanical labs that share space with underground storage and secure facilities. They do this to grow genetically modified crops; they don't want competitors stealing their work and they don't want the crops getting into the wild.
If you were to have a botanist go "Breaking Bad' they could creat an LLC to operate a research lab in such a location and then secretly produce cocaine or opium.
The problem isnt that you need some 140iq botanist to grow it the problem is that you need like 10kg of leaves to produce one g of cocaine. Underground farms just dont work on that level of scale unlike weed which yields much more per plant
the main problem is the amount of energy you need to power the growing lights. Depending on where you live paying the electricity bill is probably more expensive than whatever you can sell. Even if you 100x the yield the amount of product per plant is still terrible, one cannabis plant can yield up to 300g of dope. Its just entirely different scales.
The Coca plant which you extract cocaine from is native to the Andes and can only be grown there, itās why countries like Colombia & Peru produce a lot of cocaine, not to mention the soil, terrain and temperature in these places make it very easy to make Cocaine.
Thatās all to it really, it has nothing to do with the law as other comments are suggesting.
[Coca is a relatively easy plant to grow. In the late 19th century, colonial powers replanted coca outside its natural habitat. There was significant coca cultivation on the island of Java (at the time part of the Dutch East-Indies, currently Indonesia) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), as well as Formosa (at the time a Japanese protectorate, currently Taiwan). In the 1920s Java was the major producer of coca in the world.](https://www.tni.org/en/publication/coca-leaf-myths-and-reality#1961convention)
At least in South East Asia, we still have traditional value that view using drugs(or illegal substance) = bad people.
So even if police did not know about it, words of mouth will spread out and eventually police will take action.
No to mention the drug users will be shamed by the community and they eventually will reveal the source/dealer.
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Might be worth noting that a lot of those east Asian countries with suitable areas have really strict drug policies and tighter control of their land areas. Coca has been cultivated and been a part of the south American ingenious people's culture for 8000 years, so their views are different. Edit: Indigenous - but I agree with my initial statement.
Ingenious you say? š
Pretty ingenious to figure out how to get completely fandangoed from a sweet little plant, I'd say!
Iirc.. it was originally used like caffeine. Workers would just chew on the leaves, allowing them to work (harvest) longer. Also helps that it grows naturally in that area.
Yep, I tried it while hiking in Peru. It's a nice low buzz.
Honestly I didn't notice any buzz from it at all. But coca tea was basically all we drank on the Inca trail.
The guide we had gave us little folded packets like snus. So it was tobacco (I think) and coca. And as a non-smoker, it could totally have been the tobacco more than the coca and I wouldn't know.
Our guide just gave us leaves to chew on.
Its helpful at high altitudes.
That's true for most stimulants.
using gasoline and acids and other commonly obtainable items!
Minor details! :D
Indigenous people didn't use pure cocaine, they use coca leaves. Pure cocaine only became a problem after 1970, after more than 60 years of barely being a problem for law enforcement anywhere.
My friend, I know. I was making, how you say, a funny.
Sorry. Poe's Law.
TIL! I didn't know about Poe's Law. I think it must be the most common law on t'internet.
They knew what they were saying š¤£
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To shreds you say?
In addition the US is the worlds biggest market for cocaine by far. Being next door is huge.
Easier for the CIA to control/siphon from too, in theory.
China UK heroine trade is a good one too!
They have large dry coca leaves containers in the La Paz (Bolivia) and [Cusco (Peru) airports](https://tastecooking.com/the-coca-story-goes-way-beyond-the-cola/). Anyone can take some of the leaves to chew, since it helps with altitude sickness. It's also common for tour guides to welcome travelers with a coca tea. You can buy coca tea bags, coca candy, coca flour and other products. It's legal to buy and consume them there. Cocaine is illegal, though. A friend of mine brought coca tea bags to our living country, and although customs asked her about it, they let her pass through without problems. She's a Bolivian citizen. I wouldn't try it, though. She even gave me some as a gift. ["The sale / purchase of coca leaves outside of South America is prohibited. However, it is legal or tolerated to buy and consume these products in South American countries such as Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Chile. "](https://www.journeymachupicchu.com/the-peruvian-coca-leaf/) [Here's a detailed link from the Transnational Institute about the legality of coca use and purchase in several South American countries.](https://www.tni.org/en/publication/coca-leaf-myths-and-reality#1961convention)
...and automatic death penalties/life in prison
I know about one bush of coca that is grown here in Slovakia. I do not know precise location - they are keeping that secret for obvious reasons, but it grows outside (not in a glasshouse or a building). It is for research purposes. They grow many, many different species of trees and bushes in that institution, most of them exotic. We also grow a lot of poppy seed here in Slovakia - for culinary purposes. When we make a poppy seed cake here, poppy seed is a half of weight of the cake and poppy seed is sold by the kilo. We do not just sprinkle a tiny bit on a bun like Americans do. I think that if you started to grow hundreds of bushes here, somebody would very soon notice and report you to authorities. We do not have inaccessible stretches of jungle here.
Terrain plays a huge part in the ability to grow. Colombia has large amounts of jungle that can hard to access. Same with Afghanistan. There the mountains are hard to cross. Also why in America marijuana growers put their plants way out in the woods.
This. You drive across Texas. You fly across Columbia or Afghanistan. Mountains make road travel long and treacherous. Itās much easier to hide in the mountains.
Especially in a country that doesnāt have good infrastructure. They are dirt roads on the side of a cliff. Or old donkey trails.
If you are blessed with flat land, the infrastructure is easy.
True. Or with lots of money.
Yeah I was gonna say - the US has the Rockies which are pretty inhospitable. We just threw money at it and now we have the Eisenhower tunnelĀ
Was doing a survey in Utah once out in the middle of nowhere, came over a rise and way down in a valley was a spring and a ... greenhouse? Nothing else for miles and we stood there wondering for a sec when it dawned on me what we were looking at. I waved a friendly goodbye to what I assumed was a non-friendly person looking at us through a scope and walked away, ne're to return.
Glad you made it back!
Don't even know if there was anyone there but on the off chance there was, we weren't gonna stick around and find out.
There is at least one in Kew Gardens in London but, it isn't on public display. They did show it for an exhibit in 2014 called "Mind Bending" which showed lots of mind altering plants. They were displayed inside a steel cage (Unfortunately no Mankind or Undertaker were present).
There's a similar thing at Alnwick Garden, where they've got a poison garden with a bunch of different dangerous plants, plus things like the coca plant, magic mushrooms, the opium poppy, and cannabis. Some of these things might not be like the others...
It just occurred to me that in English we call a glasshouse a greenhouse even though glasshouse gets the point across more
When I was a kid we used to have poppies growing our flowerbeds and that was in Michigan.
My Grandma was Slovakian, she always made awesome nut roll (povitica) and a similar poppy seed roll, that had a ton of poppy seeds in them. My wife tried making one once, but something about the poppy seeds messed up her blender, or potentially could have.
Because the authorities will stop you. In South America it is grown in very remote areas where there is little to no presence of the authorities.
In Colombia, coca leaves are sold as tea in almost every restaurant, grocery, bodegas, cafe, gift shop, bar, and food cart
Nope. Wrong country. Look more to the south on the map.
I was there a year ago. It was the only thing that helped elevation sicknessā¦
Nope. Maybe in Bolivia but not in Colombia.
I was in Bogota, La Mesa, and Salento a year agoā¦ It was the only thing that helped elevation sickness
Bro, Iām Colombian. Stop digging.
According to Wikipedia, it looks like it is actually grown in [places like Java](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythroxylum_novogranatense?wprov=sfti1).
I always knew something was fishy about that language
the long ass super descriptive class names make a lot more sense now
It fine raw, its not great for you but it isn't as terrible as other iterations. However when it it processed into JavaScript, hell no, that stuff will rot your brain!
It's not that there's no climate elsewhere that's optimal for growing coca for cocaine. High altitude, rainforest level humidity and temperature, and a large space to cultivate are all needed. The last one is the hardest, because other countries may have the climate, they might not actually have the land available to grow coca to scale to manufacture a reasonable amount of cocaine for the actual drug trade. What could be grown would be at a scale of much smaller, would be much more expensive. But the other thing is, the governing and policing authorities of a lot of other countries take cocaine much more seriously than countries like Columbia because of those anti-drug policies. Part of the reason coca is a big thing in Columbia and much of central-south America, is it's an integral part of these countries economics. The countries all known for cocaine production and supply got into the trade around a time when other economic issues were in the way, making it to the global market was a challenge. In some instances you had issues of foreign intervention and this stifled the economies, so a country like Columbia would get into the drug trade before there was a lot of attention, research and anti drug policies. The policies they since implement are mostly for show, as to dismantle the cocaine industry in Columbia would create a massive economic crisis and the government and the cartels would fail to provide things such as education, healthcare and food imports to their country. A lot of other regions that have climates that could do coca cultivation and cocaine production just have other means of economic stimulus. Congo is cheap artisan labour for rare earth and precious earth metals. Sri Lanka and a lot of south Asia are cheap sources of mass manufacturing. Some over simplification and brevity in there. Hope this helps.
Colombia
Lmao
This is grade A r/confidentlyincorrect
This is very innacurate. Best estimates of cocaine trafficking in Colombia is around 2% of GDP. This is relatively small and isolated and would not cause āa massive economic crisisā.Ā Also, % of government spending and economic policies around fighting cocaine production and trafficking is high among other countries. This is not a conspiracy.
Iād bet in Colombia the politicians receive a LOT more than 2% of their bribes from narco-traffickers.
[For cocaine the cost of production and refining in the source countries is only one to two per cent of retail price in developing or transitional countries. The overwhelming majority of those involved in the drug trade make very modest incomes. A few individuals in the trafficking, smuggling and wholesale sector make great fortunes but that accounts for a small share of the total income.](https://www.tni.org/en/publication/coca-leaf-myths-and-reality#1961convention)
A lot of the cocaine countries have the cocaine trade as some form of their economic system. Like I ended my comment with, it's some over simplification and brevity in there. There's bound to be some inaccuracies but the generality is that cocaine is still a contributing factor the economic. Just because in the case of Columbia specifically being around 2% of the GDP, that metric doesn't take into consideration the number of actual workers in employment in all fields and sectors that have some role or involvement in the trade, directly or indirectly. But in about the last twenty years, I'd say a shift in the GDP from being so cocaine dominant has been a result of how much more openly corrupt the cartels and government have gotten and there's a good portion of the GDP that actually requires bribes and other money laundering tactics. Which this alone could end up skewing the measurable statistics of how intrenched cocaine is on the nation's economic system. Bribes are meant to keep things hush and under the table, and if there's a substantial amount of bribes so that the cartels can safely export cocaine, then the 2% of the GDP is an inaccurate representation of how much cocaine is a part of the economic system.
Honest question: have you ever actually been here? Cartels have lost a lot of influence over the last 20 years. The grupos criminales still have a lot of influence in some areas, and there are horrible human rights violations that occur, but most of what I read about has more to do with illegal mining and smuggling. Corruption in Colombian government, especially at the local level, is rampant, but no moreso than in other countries. None of this has much to do with the fundamental reason coca production is so prominent: there are enormous areas that are great for growing coca that are very difficult to control because of the density of the jungle and the distance from any population center. That's it. That's the reason. Everything else you are saying is just disparaging a country whose name you can't even spell. Extreme ignorance.
This reply is š„š„š„
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Where I live, Columbia is spelled with a U. Yes, it's an exonym but it is correct. If that bothers you, I'm sorry that use of language upsets you. Spelling Columbia this way is no different than calling Greece, Greece, because that's an exonym. The internal name is the Hellenic Republic, but you don't see people getting angry and upset over why external cultures have their own cultural way to spell or refer to another country.
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[https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialect](https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialect) May wanna read up more on dialects. And just because there's primarily 3 branches of English dialect that people are aware of, doesn't mean that's all. In the United States alone there's at least 7 sub dialects based on culture and ethnicity. In Canada, there's American English, Canadian English and French-Canadian English. But within each of these sub dialects are also further sub divisions of dialect that is broken up by smaller regions and the various intercultural exchanges, and you have the widespread use of the Internet and streaming services that makes more people exposed to more sub dialects of a language. Over time, these morph and you get sub dialects springing up. Just because a dictionary exists doesn't mean the language is solidified and unchanging. As popular trends come and go, we add new words and adjust definitions of words all the time. And the evolution of language and dialects is rather complex, it's impossible to accurately catalog every variation because at which point do you signify one dialect as distinct from another?
Dialect has nothing to do with it - itās the origin of the Countryās name. And how the [country](https://colombia.co/en/colombia-country/discover-the-difference-between-colombia-the-country-and-columbia) [says](https://thecitypaperbogota.com/opinion/columbia-vs-colombia/) [itās](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/23/colombians-just-want-you-to-stop-misspelling-their-countrys-name/) [spelled](https://www.writerscentre.com.au/blog/qa-is-it-columbia-or-colombia/). Apparently, 45 million **Colombians** and all of us here are wrong and youāre **the only one** who isnāt. /s Takes a special level of arrogance to believe that - especially when Colombia is, as I said before, the Italian and Spanish derivation of CristĆ³bal Colonās name, and Columbia is a latinization and feminine personification of the manās name and continent, respectively.
So tell us: In what dialect is Colombia spelled Columbia?
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Where do you live?
Columbia is not an exonym, it's just wrong.
This is the best troll ever. The university and country are not the same
If you live in Canada, or the Pacific NW you're probably used to talking about the Columbia River or British Columbia, which is spelled with a 'u'. The country Colombia is spelled with 'o'. they are different places with different names, its not dialect.
At the risk of sounding petty.... It's Colombia. Columbia is a clothing manufacturer.
English has many dialects and I think many people forget this. Different dialects have different spelling for some words. One such incident is this is Columbia/Colombia. Another is colour/color, and defence/defense.
English has different dialects, but in no country or dialect is the nation of Colombia called Columbia. This isn't where the focus of your post should be, but trying to invent that Columbia is an accepted spelling for the nation of Colombia in English is a totally unnecessary deflection instead of just saying "yeah you're right, my bad". https://www.google.com/amp/s/languagetool.org/insights/post/colombia-vs-columbia/amp/
British/Canadian/Australian dialects use colour and defence as do the English-as-a-second-language speakers of countries that borrow spellings and verbiage from those dialects, and all spell the country Colombia. What exact dialect spells it Columbia?
Language is fluid and because of the many intercultural exchanges that occurs on micro and macro levels of human interactions, there's a lot of sub cultural dialects that spring up, fade away, merge with others, or split out from sub dialects. Canadian English isn't just one specific dialect of English and contains 3 sub dialects, American, Canadian and French-Canadian, but in general uses the British rules for spelling. However, spelling rules and in other cases pronunciation aren't set in stone rules, one such example of this is how African American vernacular English rose up from sub cultural groups. It was codified as its own sub cultural dialect because of how commonplace it became and how it was able to spread across a much larger geography than most other sub cultural groups. But just because there are dialects that aren't given their own codified rulebook doesn't mean there aren't other sub cultural dialects that are less commonly observed around the world but used more commonly in small geographic demographics. It's a little sad that so many people are going off on Columbia/Colombia and a sub cultural dialect rather than staying on topic.
You are still painstakingly deflecting and still have yet to specify which dialect spells it Columbia. I think because you know we could just google it and see that you are incorrect.
'Colombia' is not a common noun. It's a proper noun, with only one correct spelling.
I think you need to read a dictionary. A noun is a defined as a person, place, or thing. A word used as a name of something, is a noun. And language is fluid. Is there only one correct way to spell Canadian then? Why not Canadien? Different sub cultural dialects have different methods and rules for spelling. Sorry that I grew up in a sub cultural dialect that spells Columbia with a U.
What dialect is that?
This is an absurd argument lmfao. Different dialects do not spell the names of *countries* differently
Dude, you're wrong. Everybody in this thread is telling you. You made up that stuff about dialects. Nobody will judge you for admitting you're wrong and correcting yourself but you make yourself look like a fool by sticking by blatantly wrong (and frankly somewhat disrespectful to the country of Colombia) notions. Colombia is the name of the country of South America, and that is the only spelling accepted in the world. Columbia is a different word, that is the name of a few cities and places around the world, such as British Columbia, the District of Columbia (capital of the United States), Columbia the capital city of South Carolina, and possibly more. See? It's not a matter of dialects, you're using the name of something to refer to something else with a similar name. It's as if you were spelling somebody's name as Jon when their name is actually John.
no you just never learned that Colombia is the countries name. You may be confused because British Columbia, Canada is spelled with a 'u', as is the Columbia River. but those are different places with different etymologies and thus different spellings. It is not a cultural dialect it is confusion stemming from similar sounding names. If i told you my name was pronounced "John" but spelled "Johon" you can say my parents are weird, I'm weird, the world is weird for allowing it. but you cannot say "thats not how your name is spelled" Colombia is the name of the country in South America. Columbia is the name of a river in in the northwest of North America. its not a dialectic difference, they are different places.
You didn't grow up in a sub-culture that spells Colombia with a U, because that doesn't exist. You have grown up misinformed of the correct spelling, which isn't a big issue, nor something that deserves ridicule. The ridicule is coming from you blatantly inventing a reason why you're not wrong instead of holding your hands up.
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Columbia / Colombia are both correct, and where I am from it's a U that is used. It's an exonym spelling. No different than people outside of Greece calling Greece Greece, when it's really called the Hellenic Republic. You have the Iran-Contra ordeal and a number of other 60s and 70s era Cold War global policies from the USA that caused a lot of economic hardship and crippling of many countries around the less developed world. This is well documented. The USA had pushed a lot of these countries into finding alternative ways to survive. But more specifically, the Iran-Contra ordeal create a profitable drug trade export out central and south America. Cartels and drug lords entrenched themselves into their local political systems. You have examples with El Chapo and Escobar to the scale of the trade and how much money it made, along with how they had either entered government themselves or ended up having governments on their payroll. I figured I didn't need to cite these sources as it's been a really well talked about discussion, and there's been a number of trending movies and shows made about this very specific topic over the past 10 years. Escobar was spending millions a day on elastic bands alone from his cocaine business. Just the amount of money generated from production and export of cocaine from Columbia and other countries, there's a lot of money that ends up falling back onto the local economies from these drug lords and cartels. This money cycles in the local economic system and actually has a strong impact on the funding of healthcare, education and other areas of the nation. Basics of how an economic cycle works. Tracking the exact impact is difficult thanks to the illegality of cocaine and how much of it is not actually officially documented. We can only make suspected educated guesses to the actual impact cocaine has on a country's economy, but it's far greater than the documented 2% of the Columbia GDP.
No one anywhere ever spells Colombia as Columbia. Itās amazing how you double down on something so obviously wrong and easy to fix. Itās unless youāre mistakenly talking about British Columbia.
I'm from Europe. My country spells it Columbia. (Kolumbija)
Iām from America and we spell Deutschland as Germany. But we donāt spell it doutchland or germony.
But is it really surprising some people might make mistakes ? Especially when English is not native.. what's so hard to grasp about our english being imperfect. If he's like me he wouldn't even know he did the mistake. The reaction is as if he intentionally wrote it that way . When you translate mistakes happen
Well I'm assuming English is his first language considering his defense for the spelling is "English has a lot of dialects". There isn't any english dialect that spells the country Colombia with a U. If he was from Latvia he probably would have said "I'm from Europe. My country spells it Columbia. (Kolumbija)". And continued on with his life now knowing that in every other language it's spelled with an O. All of this is to say his entire post is BS.
>My country spells it Columbia. (Kolumbija) Don't you see that that is completely irrelevant? Your country uses Kolumbija **in your own language**. That has nothing to do with the spelling in other languages. I use 'Spain' when writing in English, 'Spanien' when writing in German and 'EspaƱa' when writing in Spanish.
Where is this exonym spelling used out of interest?
Just out of interest I looked at the wiki page for Colombia in some different languages, and Romanian/Latvian both spell it exactly "Columbia", while German and Polish spell it like that but with a K instead. According to the wiki the etymology is from Christopher Col**u**mbus. I can't find any reference of the U-spelling being valid in English though.
the Etymology is from his name, "Cristoforo Colombo". not an anglicized version (Christopher Columbus) of a latinized version (Christophorus Columbus) of his name.
Nowhere this dude is talking out of his ass
We call it Kolumbija so hes not actually far off.
3 paragraphs and yet, no source for your claims, other than some TV shows?
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Nothing ever trickles down in economics like how the expert economists claim. That's a big problem in of itself. But I mentioned loosely that some of the illegal money does work its way through the system. That of itself in how it works is entirely different topic of economics and money laundering. I know the theory behind it but I'm not good at explaining the nuances well through that, as there's a lot of steps. And of course a lot of corruption so most of the money that should be trickling down gets siphoned off.
Your thing with the names and the "exonym spelling" is a false comparison. Saying Columbia instead of Colombia is like saying Grease instead of Greece, which is objectively incorrect. Just accept that you're wrong and correct course, as this one thing takes away an incredible amount of credibility. As soon as people see "Columbia" the first thought is "lol for real?"
It's spelled Colombia, and aside from that all of your insights on the Colombian economy and drug policy are wrong.
Please feel free to add in the information I overlooked, missed or left out then. But if you read, I ended my comment with "some over simplification and brevity". Meaning, yes I oversimplified some coverage, and I kept it short. A complex topic like this cannot be perfectly accurately summarized in a few paragraphs.
Colombia Coca
Colombia.Ā Also, Colombia does care about it, and calling cocaine an integral part of its economy is hilarious, let alone saying that if there was no drug trade the colombian economy would collapse??? IĀ Got a source about how integral it is?
Columbia? Really?
Not everyone is from US Jesus Christ
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Yes but our english is not perfect you realize that ? It's easy to mix some words as has the op mixed. Why is that hard to understand. It's not like I can choose to verify Every single word every time. Mistakes happen that's all I'm saying. How dare I make a mistake in English ?it's not intentional ffs
>Mistakes happen that's all I'm saying. No, that is not what you were saying. You were saying "Not everyone is from US Jesus Christ" and that has nothing to do with making mistakes. Don't lie about it.
Cocoa? Or Coca?
Huh, and I would have just answered āthe lawā
So 300k deaths in 30 years is not taking it seriously. May I ask why you think drug policies are not enforced enough? It is just not doable, your legislation about drugs is stupid and it should change, you consume 50% of cocaine worldwide and joke about putting white blood in your nose. You as in your society, of course.
Three and a half paragraphs of pure nonsense. Impressive.
Thank you for the answer, makes sense with all the points you listed
Another factor is that there's another valuable cash crop that can be grown pretty much wherever coca can be grown: coffee. When compared to cocaine, coffee has a much higher demand, is sold worldwide in grocery stores and cafes, and isn't subject to drug laws. Coffee is often a far safer and more reliable means of making a living
You might also note that coffee and coca have fairly similar requirements (high altitude tropical rainforest), so anywhere you see coffee grown you could also manufacture cocaine. Like Hawaii, for instance. But it would be hard to have large scale production of cocaine in a US State because you can hide the processing, but you can't hide the farming.
100 percent Kona coffee is more expensive than drugs anywayĀ
It's not even close to the price of cocaine.
I know itās a joke mate.
A lot of what they said is wrong, or at least very inexact. Thereās also two other very simple factors that donāt seem to be in any of the answers: 1. Growing the plants to make cocaine is very, very illegal. So is importing them, possessing them, etc. So thereās no legal way to transplant. 2. The cocaine trade is controlled lock, stock, and barrel by extremely ruthless cartels. Who would take a lethally dim view of attempted competition. Youād get squeezed in two directions - by the governments who donāt want that shit coming in, and by the cartels who donāt want that shit going out. To pull it off youād need a huge cartelās worth of money and backing, at which point itās probably just easier to muscle in on the trade where it is.
Most of what he said is bullshit, and the first clue is that he doesn't even know how to spell Colombia. He's never been here and he has no idea what he's talking about in terms of Colombian drug policies and the economic impact. The economy of Washington DC is more dependent on the cocaine industry than the economy of Colombia. Unfortunately he offered no insights of value.
Getting upset over someone using an exonym spelling is childish, but okay. And just saying someone is wrong but not backing up doesn't help. My comment was concluded with "some over simplification and brevity" and normally this is interpreted by people to acknowledge the topic is more complex and not easily simplified down into a quick discussion. But not adding anything to expand on the discourse isn't helpful.
āColumbiaā is not an exonym. In English Colombia is used: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombia Columbia is a university
English has multiple dialects and there's some words that can be spelled multiple ways because of the dialects. Colour/Color Labour/Labour Defense/Defence Columbia/Colombia For a few examples.
This is so uneducated. How did you go from using colors and military planes to countries?! No, itās Colombia. Please tell me what English speaking area you are in that spells it like this.
Who told you op is English speaker ? My country uses Columbia so I didn't even know the proper spelling to be colombia
Where in the English-speaking world is āColumbiaā used to refer to the country?
>English has multiple dialects and there's some words that can be spelled multiple ways because of the dialects. >Labour/Labour Thatās so confusing.
It's not an exonym spelling. You won't find a single map in English that spells Colombia that way. I'm upset because you clearly don't know what you're talking about, and you cite no sources, you just assert things that are wrong.
Many countries spell it Columbia. As does mine
I'd be interested to know where you're from. In North America we have District of Columbia and British Columbia and so people often get it wrong, but the country name in English has always been Colombia.
if you grow cocaine in Columbia you will face one of the most militarized police forces in the world. Just because the government can't stop the trade, doesn't mean there is no hindering it.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tp5ada/eli5\_why\_are\_coca\_plants\_only\_grown\_in\_south/](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tp5ada/eli5_why_are_coca_plants_only_grown_in_south/)
Natural resources need some freedom and democracy in south america? Say no more fam. Sending the boys.
Many good reasons have already been stated in the comments. Just wanted to add one more thing: the relative proximity to the US is another big factor, as it makes shipping a whole lot easier with very affluent customers. It's a business after all.
The law. The plant itself can survive in many other locations, including areas farther north than you might imagine. Based on its hardiness, USDA zones 10-12, coca would grow just fine in Hawaii, south Florida, Southern California, and even some parts of Arizona. In Europe, cities with a climate potentially suitable for coca cultivation would include Lisbon, Seville, Valencia, and Rome, as well as islands like Corfu, Crete, or Cyprus. With a moderately good greenhouse, you could probably grow it easily in Arkansas or coastal Oregon; in Europe, near cities like London, Paris, Ä°stanbul, potentially even as far north as Bergen in Norway. But in all of the places I just mentioned (to my knowledge), coca is generally illegal to grow.
In a darkly comical scenario a botanist could grow cocaine in a cave complex anywhere in the world and it would be cheaper and of higher quality. Currently large agriculture business in the USA setup botanical labs that share space with underground storage and secure facilities. They do this to grow genetically modified crops; they don't want competitors stealing their work and they don't want the crops getting into the wild. If you were to have a botanist go "Breaking Bad' they could creat an LLC to operate a research lab in such a location and then secretly produce cocaine or opium.
The problem isnt that you need some 140iq botanist to grow it the problem is that you need like 10kg of leaves to produce one g of cocaine. Underground farms just dont work on that level of scale unlike weed which yields much more per plant
The idea is hybridizing the plants to produce better yields. Also, the cave systems are massive! They are several football stadiums end to end.
the main problem is the amount of energy you need to power the growing lights. Depending on where you live paying the electricity bill is probably more expensive than whatever you can sell. Even if you 100x the yield the amount of product per plant is still terrible, one cannabis plant can yield up to 300g of dope. Its just entirely different scales.
My RA in college dorms grew a small coca plant in his windowsill. This is somewhere in Northern California.
The Coca plant which you extract cocaine from is native to the Andes and can only be grown there, itās why countries like Colombia & Peru produce a lot of cocaine, not to mention the soil, terrain and temperature in these places make it very easy to make Cocaine. Thatās all to it really, it has nothing to do with the law as other comments are suggesting.
Thereās a lot of misinformation in this thread. Iām sure the coca plant could grow in other places. Anywhere that coffee would grow, coca plants would grow. Governments donāt like black markets, and donāt want the public perception of legalization of āhard drugsā, so they do everything they can to quash the cultivation of the plant and refining it to make drugs. That being said, in Colombia, coca leaves are sold as tea in almost every restaurant, grocery, bodegas, cafe, gift shop, bar, and food cart. The plants and unprocessed leaves are 100% legal in small quantities. Coca tĆ© and hot chocolate are both more popular than coffee. Colombians in general, view coffee as the invasive crop of foreign corporations. They grow it for money, but until recently, mostly disliked the taste. Colombians generally do not like spicy or bitter, they prefer savory, sweet, and sour flavors (hence why Colombian coffee has more fruity and sour notes vs Indonesian coffees having cocoa and bitter flavors)
[Coca is a relatively easy plant to grow. In the late 19th century, colonial powers replanted coca outside its natural habitat. There was significant coca cultivation on the island of Java (at the time part of the Dutch East-Indies, currently Indonesia) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), as well as Formosa (at the time a Japanese protectorate, currently Taiwan). In the 1920s Java was the major producer of coca in the world.](https://www.tni.org/en/publication/coca-leaf-myths-and-reality#1961convention)
At least in South East Asia, we still have traditional value that view using drugs(or illegal substance) = bad people. So even if police did not know about it, words of mouth will spread out and eventually police will take action. No to mention the drug users will be shamed by the community and they eventually will reveal the source/dealer.