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We can’t distinguish wild coca plants from those grown to make cocaine - EurekAlert
A new paper published in Molecular Biology and Evolution indicates that, while the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has collected annual data on areas of coca cultivation in South America for decades – to monitor the establishment of illegal plantations and associated deforestation – scientists still can’t reliably distinguish between different types of coca plants. While identification often relies on leaf shape and size, this does not reflect differences between coca varieties grown for extracting the alkaloid cocaine (the active ingredient in the recreational drug), coca cultivated for traditional purposes, and wild-growing coca plants.
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