I brought this bag of Erythroxylum. It’s a genus of plants that includes the cocoa plant. […] Timothy Plowman was the world expert on this genus and family and was a personal friend of my advisor, so it’s cool to see this around. […] He had more than a decade of time where he was a scientist at the Field Museum, but he died very quickly [after] he became in charge of the botany department there, so there are a bunch of different bags with species in here labeled with specimen numbers and stuff. […] He and his advisor Schultes were involved with some interesting plants, some drug plants for sure. […] They did this real cool study of these caterpillars, which is one of the main herbivores on Erythroxylum coca, the cocoa plant, and they studied whether the frass (the insect sh*t) would actually have cocaine in it. They routinely found that it had about 6% cocaine by weight, which is almost as much as is in the plant, about 1% less. […] I don’t know if it was the DEA, it was some agency [that] got millions of dollars to in mass drop these caterpillars on fields in South America as a way of defending our country against the vice of cocaine.

This belongs in the History of War on Drugs Museum

Exhibited by Joshua Henkin

Transcript edited by Serena Washington