The cocaine content of chewed coca leaf is far lower than what the average snorter would snort.
Cocaine is no more toxic than caffeine (not saying that's good as they're both toxic.)
The stimulation produced by coca tea is similar to that of green tea, even milder if you are sensative to caffeine.
The effects of coca leaf are buffered/modulated by the other alkaloids in the leaf.
There really isn't a big cardiotoxic risk associated with coca leaves.
I didn't say chewing coca was a big risk. However the idea that cocaine is no more toxic than caffeine is totally ridiculous and I don't know where you get it. They have extremely different properties. Even if you dig really hard for negative health outcomes in caffeine studies you won't find many, the overall evidence is generally equivocal, although I personally lean on the side of it being healthy, vitamin-like substance.
However, cocaine is cardiotoxic in a number of ways which don't apply to caffeine. It is a sodium and potassium channel blocker (that's why it works as local anaesthetic), it causes increased clotting while also causing coronary vasospasms, it dramatically increases blood pressure, causes dramatic catecholamine increase, also does damage to small vessels with only occasional use. In fact, people speculate that it is directly toxic to heart tissue and causes scarring upon impact (meaning circulating blood levels could cause death to heart tissue). Cocaine is one of the few drugs where I think all the negativity about it is justified
I know that this mostly doesn't apply to coca, but I'm not sure we know why. My theory is that some of the other allkaloids in coca are so protective that they make all the difference.
I have chewed coca, which can be up to 1% cocaine, and if you chew it right (for awhile, with a base to extract the active ingredient) you can get doses of up to 40-50 mg of cocaine from not chewing that much coca. For totally pure cocaine that's actually a solid dose. I can attest that you can definitely get a "high" from coca.
Intense coca users who chew all day are certainly consuming a decent amount of cocaine, yet they don't seem to have the same issues that someone using even small amounts of daily cocaine would have.
It's not only attributable to dose, so it's very interesting. I wonder if it's partially genetic. Most of the studies on coca use have been on peruvian indians.