Henman, Anthony - Interview

7/28/2019 Henman, Anthony - Interview

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Anthony Henman interview

In 1978, Cambridge-educated anthropologist and author

Anthony Henman published "Mama Coca," a groundbreaking

work of ethnobotanical anthropology that for the first time

showed Westerners not only the indigenous coca culture of

the Andes but also the beginnings of the politics of coca and

cocaine prohibition and how they impacted traditionalcultures. Since then, Henman has continued to work as an

anthropologist and expert on psychoactive substances in the

Western Hemisphere, and was honored with a keynote

address at the Global Social Thematic Forum in Cartagena,

Colombia, this week. DRCNet spoke with Henman in

Cartagena on Tuesday evening.

The Week Online: How did you come to write "Mama Coca,"

and what happened once it was published?

Anthony Henman: I first came to Colombia in the early 1970s.

Things were wide open then; there was an open cannabis

market in Bogota, and cocaine was just beginning to appear.At that point, I wasn't really interested in cocaine; I was more

of a toker at the time. In 1973, I finished my university

studies at Cambridge and was offered a job in Popayan, the

regional capital of the traditional coca growing area in

Colombia. It was very much a part of the gringo trail at the



time, with all kinds of traveling hippies coming through town.

There was very good weed, the Colombian red bud. And then

there was the very traditional country scene as well. I was

amazed at peoples' different reactions to the coca leaf. Having

lived through all that, and given my interest in the plant and

its traditional use, I couldn't ignore what was beginning to

happen at the time. That was the first area that set up

cocaine processing kitchens, although they produced pounds,

not tons. And the cocaine always came out different,

sometimes pink, sometimes off-white, which proved that is

was coming from a number of small labs, not the monopoly

business we have now. Actually, I doubt that even today it is

as much a monopoly as portrayed by the media.

"Mama Coca" was originally conceived as a classic

conventional anthropological description of coca use, and

cocaine was not originally part of what I had planned. But

cocaine was coming on top of the traditional use, and I

couldn't ignore it. While people were interested in the ethno-

botanical stuff, what made "Mama Coca" notorious was that it

was the first time anyone got into print with criticisms and

allegations against the war on drugs and the drug warriors.

There was a chapter in the middle of the book that dealt with

that. For my efforts, I got harassed by immigration officials

for years to come, and in Britain the book was seized by



police and the publisher was prosecuted under the Obscene

Publications Act. I guess they read the act broadly, since it is

supposed to cover works likely to "corrupt or deprave." We

got a lot of notoriety in the press, but it didn't do us much

good, since all the copies had been seized and were sitting in

a warehouse. The prosecution lost the case in 1984, but it still

took us nine more months to get the books back, and by then

everyone had lost interest. It's a good example of how official

harassment can be effective even when they don't have a

good legal case. It wasn't too good for my career as an author

either, because it discouraged British publishers from

publishing books about drugs or ever having anything to do

with me again.

WOL: What have you been doing since then?

Henman: I've done research on lots of other sorts of drugs

and drug use. I studied mushrooms in Wales for my doctoral

thesis, and I did a lot of work on drug prescribing and needle

exchange programs in Liverpool and New York, including a

major evaluation of needle exchanges in the late 1990s in

New York. It was an annual report for the Department of

Health. I've also published a few papers about empowering

drug users and their organizations in that context.



WOL: Are you affiliated with the organization Mama Coca?

Henman: No. They asked my permission to use the name,

and I said of course. We also correspond all the time, but I

am not a member.

WOL: What are you doing these days?

Henman: I'm working on a research project in Peru on

mescaline-containing cacti, specifically the San Pedro. There

are three different species of San Pedro, with slight

differences among the three. I'm trying to collect as many as

I can in their native environments. I am not a chemist, so I

try to feel what the difference may be by subjective

experimentation. I've tried different ways of preparing it, but

it still tastes pretty awful. Still, it is very much the basis of

traditional medicine in northern Peru and coastal Peru. It is

the basis for divination and curing, but I find the doses they

use for those purposes disappointingly small. People feel a

little strange, but they don't really trip. The curanderos,

however, are a different story; they sip it all day long. It is

not discussed as a drug problem; in fact, it is even legal in the

US, and you will find it in every garden store that carries

cacti, because it is very good for root stock. It spread all



around the world as root stock, and that was before anyone

knew it contained mescaline.

My main interest has always been the coca leaf, but while it

has interesting botanical, medicinal and ethnographic aspects,

it is a subject that is becoming over-determined by the

current politics of the cocaine business -- the violence, the

corruption, all that -- so it difficult to talk about coca leaves

as a traditional path in Colombia. You can do that in Bolivia or

Peru, where it is still legal, but here in Colombia, when the

public hears coca, it thinks of Pablo Escobar. I find it tedious

and tiresome that one cannot talk about the interesting uses

of coca in Colombia. This drug prohibition and drug trafficking

nightmare will eventually end, or if not, the whole planet will

be destroyed by it. I hope drug law reform will end this

nightmare and people can get back to understanding these

plants as they really are.

WOL: How do you look at coca?

Henman: Coca is not just an object for our consumption, but

a historical subject in itself. First, we have to erase from our

minds the image of the damned leaf. Coca doesn't deserve

the sobriquet. It's a plant, and like every other species, it

wants to reproduce. It is a hermaphrodite, it is very fertile,



and it is chock full of alkaloids. It is a dangerous plant, some

say, a liar, a traitor. But I say that this slander of the coca

plant is hideously repugnant. After 50 years of war against

coca, we have not met one goal of the anti-coca policies. The

plant continues to reproduce. Even worse, every time there is

a change of ministers, they come out with the same banalities

about how they will fight the plant endlessly and how they will

win. They can't win, but they always say they are on the

verge of winning. A war against coca can never bring anything

positive to the planet, despite what they say. We have to

change our perspective completely and become at peace with

coca as it deserves, for it is a plant with many virtues.

Perhaps they can't eradicate coca because the objective is

mistaken; perhaps it is because the real objectives of the war

on drugs have nothing to do with their declared objectives.

But I think this will pass; I can imagine a day when it is

cultivated on a legal basis wherever it is advisable.

This war on coca is violence and killing without end. They say

they are doing this killing and poisoning for the good of all.

How absurd! It is absurd because what they accomplish is to

make coca part of a malignant trade all over the planet. This

has people thinking about the legalization of coca. That would

be good. It would eliminate the negative aspects, especially



the criminal aspect, which, after all, are not part of the coca

plant, but part of drug prohibition.

Documents

Henman, Anthony - Interview