You can chew out the sugar or cocaine if you like.
(I think coca needs an acid base extraction to get a crystalline form, but that’s straightforward chemistry at scale)
If crude juice is extracted in Brazil and refined in Canada, I’m surprised that it is viewed as cost-effective to transport so much unneeded liquid by sea.
Sea transit is cheap, sugarcane grows better in the tropics than beets in cooler places. Harder to harvest below-ground stuff.
Canada used to subsidize/protect sugar beet producers (to keep them competitive), but largely got out of it.
Maybe that’s why we still refine it: because the plants still exist.
Nope it's not possible and it's more than obvious way.
The cocaine content in coca leaves is 0.23% to 0.96%. Sugarcane has a magnitude or so higher sugar content.
Cocaine is not a synthetic drug. Been around long before any human was walking around.
You can industrialize its production and get close to sugar level production pricing and distribution. Sugar sourced from Brazil hits my Toronto supermarket shelf bagged at CAD$1.50/kg at 99.9% purity, including retailer markup. Which is like 1/50000th the retail price of cocaine.
Even if it costs 10x as much due to lower volume/weaker extracts/slower growth/additional processing, you're talking a 99.9something% reduction in resource expenditure per dose.
Price of something is a good representation of the resources destroyed ("costs") in its production.