The World of Caffeine (47 page)

A sign of the importance of cola to the Africans is the story of its divine origin:

The earliest mentions of the fruit may have occurred in the writings of El Ghafeky, a twelfth-century Spanish physician, and of the thirteenth-century Arab botanist Ebn El-Baithar. While their descriptions of a certain fruit sound as if cola is being referred to, their characterization of the seeds seems not to fit this identification. In any case, the word “cola” first occurs in the last half of the sixteenth century, in the works of Clusius and other writers who learned of the existence of the plant from returning European travelers and explorers.

Louis Lewin (1850–1929), a German pharmacologist, physician, and researcher, reports in his book
Phantastica
that, as late as 1920, cola nuts still played an important part

Lewin adds that, at this time, “These nuts, like every eagerly desired substance which modifies cerebral activity, are fairly expensive. Every thing, even slaves, can be bought with nuts.”

In some African countries these caffeine-containing nuts are so valuable and widely coveted for their stimulating power that they continue to be used as local currency.

Like other caffeinated botanicals in Arabia, China, and South America, cola nuts are important fixtures of the ceremonies of everyday African life. In Nigeria, for example, a marriage proposal is accompanied by the white variety of cola nuts and a refusal is accompanied by red cola nuts. Cola is also a necessary part of every dowry. In addition, “Oaths are sworn on the kola nut, friendships or hostilities are symbolized by kola and some nuts are even buried with the dead.”
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The sorcerers of the Konkomba, a tribe living in the Oti Plain, part of the former French and British territories of northern Togoland, are well known to specialize in administering fatal medicines to procure the death of their victims. Cola nuts have a cleft down the middle that these magicians have used as a convenient repository for their poisons. Therefore, as a precaution, tribe members will not eat cola nuts given to them by strangers. The usual procedure is to “accept the nut, thank the giver, and, later, throw it away.”
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Cola nuts have a strong taste and, compared with other natural sources, contain a strong concentration of caffeine. However, contrary to a common belief, the flavor of cola soft drinks does not come from these nuts and neither does their caffeine. While it is true that cola soft drinks contain significant doses of caffeine, their insignificant cola nut content contributes only about 5 percent of the total. The rest of the caffeine in colas and all of the caffeine found in other sodas is a by-product of coffee and tea decaffeination that has been added to the citrus, vanilla, cinnamon, and other flavoring components of these drinks.

A curiosity is gotu cola, also known as Indian pennywort, a traditional Chinese medicinal herb believed by some to prolong life. This swamp plant is native to China, Sri Lanka, and South Africa and has been used as a folk remedy for leprosy, cancer, skin disorders, arthritis, hemorrhoids, and tuberculosis. It has also been used as an energy tonic, aphrodisiac, and treatment for mental disorders. In the United States it is an ingredient in many herbal “energy formulas.” A common misconception is that gotu cola contains caffeine. Although it is true that gotu cola may well contain anti-inflammatory glycosides, agents that can heal skin ulcers, it contains no caffeine whatsoever.

Guarana
(Paullinia cupana)
is a woody climbing plant of the soapberry family (Sapindaceae), native to the Amazon basin. It has large leaves, clusters of short-stalked flowers, and yields a fruit about the size of a coffee berry, usually containing a single seed. The genus took its name from its discoverer, C.F.Paulini, a German botanist who died in 1712.
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Guarana seeds, named for the Guaranis Indians,
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are roasted and brewed to make a stimulating drink popular in South America. It has a bitter, astringent taste, and a faint coffeelike odor. The caffeine content of these seeds is about three times greater than that of an equivalent weight in coffee beans. Because guarana has such a high concentration of the drug, it was used in the nineteenth century as a source of the compound for medicinal purposes.
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The bark of the yoco tree
(Paullinia yoco),
a sister species to guarana, is also used like guarana seeds to prepare a caffeinated drink.

To make the tea, guarana seeds are shelled and washed and pounded into a fine powder, which is kneaded with water into dough and shaped into cylinders. When these rods are dried in the sun or over a low fire, they become very hard and assume a russet color. About a half a teaspoonful is grated from these sticks, which are sometimes called “guarana bread” or “Brazilian cocoa,” and dissolved, along with sugar, in hot water. As typically prepared, the resulting brew, which is known as “Brazilian tea,” carries a bigger caffeine charge than coffee. Guarana’s astringency, like tea’s, is caused by tannin. In addition to containing caffeine, guarana and yoco each yield a chemical that produces soapy lather, saponin, which is used in tropical countries as a soap substitute. Saponin has the unusual property of stupefying fish when thrown into small streams.
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The habit of Brazilian miners, who believe that the beverage is not only refreshing but preventative of many diseases, is to carry a guarana stick, which is almost as hard as stone, together with the palate bone or scale of a big fish with which to grate it. The Orinoco Indians, who give their name to the valley to which cacao is indigenous, ferment the crushed seeds until nearly putrid and infuse the product with hot water.

Guarana is also commonly sweetened and bottled as a carbonated soft drink, similar in effect, if not in flavor, to our familiar cola sodas. In the United States, guarana is sometimes an ingredient in herbal teas, and capsules of guarana powder are sold in health food stores, under such brand names as ZING. These products are often misleadingly marketed as new organic stimulants from the Amazon rainforest, taking advantage of the fact that most people are unaware that caffeine is found in plants other than coffee or tea. Here is an excerpt from a French advertisement for guarana pills that supplies a fanciful history, while also trying to convince its readers that guarana is popular in the United States today:

Caffeine is not the only naturally occurring stimulating alkaloid that has been consumed as a beverage, food, or masticatory. Here is a brief description of some other botanical uppers and their sources.

Coca

The coca plant
(Erythroxylon coca)
is a small tree or shrub with tiny white flowers native to the region of the Andes Mountains. The natural source of the drug cocaine, the leaves have been mixed with powdered lime and chewed by natives as a stimulant and panacea since ancient times.

Usually planted from seeds, the seedlings are raised in a nursery for up to ten months. Once replanted, the amount of cultivation lavished on them varies with the size and location of the plantation. When the tree is about six feet tall, pickers, in the spring and again in the fall, gather the leaves, which are then cured and dried, before being powdered for local use or sold for extraction. When supplies from South America fell short of worldwide demand, coca was cultivated in the East Indies, with the result that much of the legal international trade originates in Java.
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In the regions to which it is native, powdered coca leaves are freely available in local markets. The chewing is a general practice among Andean laborers, who claim that, as a result of their use of the leaves, they can work for days with little food or rest. Distances in the region are sometimes reckoned in
cocadas,
the range that can be traversed on one chew. The admixture of lime is considered indispensable to producing any effect, and lime is similarly used in commercial processing to extract the alkaloid, cocaine.

Coca leaf use creates an apparently minimal detriment to the people who chew it and the society in which they live. In striking contrast are the detrimental effects of using extracted cocaine, a practice generally associated with personal instability, drug dependence, paranoia, violence, and eventual psychosis. The reasons for these marked differences are unclear. Scientists point to the slower rate of absorption from chewing as compared with smoking or injection, to a different set of social mores, and suggest that there may be other active alkaloids in the leaf that moderate the effects of cocaine in a way that is not achieved when the extracted chemical is consumed by itself. The fact is that science today has not solved the mystery of these disparate effects, and a similar uncertainty and confusion surrounds the differences between the effects created by each of the plants listed in this section when compared with the effects of the chemical extracts of each plant’s “active principle.” We like to think that our contemporary science has all the basic answers, but insofar as understanding the way these psychoactive plants do what they do, the answers still elude us.

Khat

In 1892, when James Walsh published his book on tea, he mentioned an “Arabian tea” that he called “Cathadules,” which he said was prepared from the leaves of shrub “extensively cultivated there for that purpose, as much attention being bestowed upon it by the natives as on coffee. This preparation is sometimes also called ‘Abyssinian tea.’” He observed, “The leaves are also chewed, when green, like those of the coca in South America, being highly intoxicating, particularly in the wild state.”
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Khat (qat, kat, chat,
murmungu, mirra,
or
miraa),
or
Catha edulis,
is an evergreen shrubby tree whose fresh leaves and young twigs are chewed for their stimulating effect and is also the name for the popular beverage brewed from its leaves and used by millions in a wide area of East Africa and the Middle East. But it is in the Yemen, the traditional home of coffee, that khat’s use has for centuries been a pervasive social institution that colors family, work, and recreational activities and associations. Although its consumption is general in the Yemen among men, women, and children, in neighboring countries its use is more limited. For example, it is reported that truck drivers are the primary regular users of this plant in Kenya.

Ever since khat came to European attention from its widespread use in the Middle East, it has been assumed to contain the same stimulant as coffee and tea. Therefore the active ingredient was, on analogy with “caffeine,” given the name “cathine.” Today it is known that khat contains no caffeine but does contain several active chemicals, some of which are alkaloid stimulants structurally similar to amphetamines. Cathinon is thought to cause the primary stimulant qualities of khat, while cathine and norephedrene are said to contribute to its other somatic effects, such as brachiodilation, or enlargement of the passages leading to the lungs. Based on an analysis of twenty-two khat samples of diverse origins, one group of researchers determined that, in 100 grams of fresh leaves, there are 120 mg of cathine, 36 mg of cathinone, and 8 mg of norephedrine. The leaves lose their potency when they dry out, which is one reason khat use has not spread beyond the areas of its cultivation. Unlike coca leaves, the leaves of khat, which have a bitter, astringent taste, are swallowed after they are chewed.

Yemen’s extremes of altitude and variations in soil and climate make it suitable for the cultivation of a diverse variety of crops. Mediterranean fruits such as oranges and grapes are grown on the slopes, and bananas, cotton, dates, tobacco, and mangos are produced on the coastal plain. Coffee and khat are grown in the central highlands, and, together with cotton, constitute the biggest cash crops. Coffee had long been the most important export of the Yemen, famous for its superior mocha, so called because, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mocha was its primary port of egress into the world market. Though the best Arabian coffee, among the most prized and expensive anywhere, is still grown in the Yemeni district of San’a, coffee cultivation is losing ground to the more profitable cultivation of khat, for Yemeni khat, like Yemeni coffee, is considered to be of superior quality. Strange to say, the Yemen, which all the world thinks of as the first home of fine coffee, has become intensely preoccu pied with the use of a different psychoactive stimulant plant, to the extent that coffee there, in both use and cultivation, has been relegated to a distant second.