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12(1): Medicinal and poisonous plants 1

Erythroxylum coca Lamk

This article should be read together with the article on the genus: Erythroxylum in the Handbook volume indicated above in this database.

Encycl. méth. Bot. 2: 393 (1786).

Erythroxylum peruvianum Prescott (1847), Erythroxylum bolivianum Burck (1890).

Coca, Peru coca, Peruvian coca (En).

Erythroxylum coca var. coca (Bolivian or Huánoco coca) is widely cultivated in the Andean region, where it locally also occurs wild. It is not easy to cultivate elsewhere, and it is little known in other parts of the world. In South-East Asia, it is only grown in botanical gardens, not as a crop. Erythroxylum coca var. ipadu (Amazonian coca) is only found as cultivated plant in Amazonian lowland rain forest areas.

Erythroxylum coca is the most important commercial coca species, cultivated for the legal or illegal production of cocaine. The leaves are used as a masticatory by millions of Indians in South America.

A shrub or small tree, with very prominent, sometimes warty lenticels on the branches; leaves mainly at the end of the twigs, early caducous, broad-elliptical, 3-8 cm x 2-4 cm, base cuneate, apex acuminate or rounded with a mucronate tip; flowers in clusters of 6-12, rarely more, in the axils of leaves or ramenta, pedicel 4-6 mm, calyx with a 0.2-1 mm long tube and 5 lobes, triangular-ovate, 1-2 mm long, acute, green, petals oblong, 4-4.5 cm x 2 mm, yellow or yellowish green; fruit oblong-ovoid, pointed, 7-10 mm x 3-4.5 mm, red. Erythroxylum coca has heterodistylous flowers, and self-pollination or pollination between plants of the same flower type gives few seeds. In Bogor it produces abundant fruit but not much foliage.

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R.C.K. Chung & M. Brink

Chung, R.C.K. & Brink, M., 1999. Erythroxylum coca Lamk. In: de Padua, L.S., Bunyapraphatsara, N. and Lemmens, R.H.M.J. (Editors): Plant Resources of South-East Asia No 12(1): Medicinal and poisonous plants 1. PROSEA Foundation, Bogor, Indonesia. Database record: prota4u.org/prosea