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A pile of dried green and brown coca leaves on a clear white background.
Dried coca leaves. (Photo: Bachelot Pierre J-P)

Cocaine first isolated as a drug from the coca plant.

Date: 1850

DRUG
INDG
TFCM
PHA
MED
Dried coca leaves. (Photo: Bachelot Pierre J-P)

Coca is a plant native to the highlands in Peru and has been long used as a stimulant and for health support by Indigenous communities there. It will begin to be used in Western biomedicine starting in the 1880s.