https://nationalpost.com/news/coca-colas-cocaine-connection-is-worth-over-billions
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One of the world’s biggest beverages companies once added cocaine to their offering, now Coca-Cola sells the narcotic byproduct to Pharma.
The lone U.S. factory authorized to import coca leaves has had its licence renewed by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
The New Jersey-based Stepan Company facility has been processing coca leaves for Coca-Cola for more than a century, reports The New York Post.
Importing coca leaves was banned in 1921 but an exception was made for Maywood Chemical Works, which operated the factory before its acquisition by Stepan Company in 1959.
While the original 19th-century Coca-Cola recipe did contain a residual amount of cocaine precursor, it was largely reduced by the early part of the century and eliminated by 1930.
These days, the coca leaves are used to create a “decocainized” flavouring ingredient, while the residual byproduct is sold to Mallinckrodt, an opioid company that manufactures a numbing agent commonly used by dentists.
The DEA did not respond to a Daily Mail request for comment about how much coca the company currently imports but previous reports indicate that more than 500 tonnes of leaves could be processed in the factory annually.
In the 2012 book A Secret History of Coffee, Coca and Cola, author Ricardo Cortés wrote that the National Company of the Coca, a Peruvian state-owned company, exported about 95 tonnes of coca leaves to Maywood each year between 2007 and 2010.
The legal exemption has helped the company grow into a global giant worth more than US$265 billion, according to economic historian Chris Calton.
“Coca-Cola’s success as the mega-company it is today is due, at least in part, to special privileges granted by government during the Second World War, and the suppression of potential competitors in the early years of Harry Anslinger’s anti-drug policies,” Calton wrote in a 2016 article published by Australian economics think tank Mises Institute.
In the 1930s, as competitors to Maywood, like S.B. Penick Company, tried to get permission to purchase coca leaf flavouring ingredients, they were denied by Anslinger, the head of the federal Bureau of Narcotics.
“The federal government was officially working to suppress potential Coca-Cola competitors,” Calton writes.
Earlier this year, two Canadian companies were granted amendments to their dealer’s licenses from Health Canada to legally possess, produce, sell and distribute coca leaf and cocaine to other licence holders, such as hospitals and pharmacies.
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A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola
A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola is an illustrated book disclosing new research in the coca leaf trade conducted by The Coca-Cola Company. 2011 marked the 125th anniversary of its iconic beverage, and the fiftieth anniversary of the international drug control treaty that allows Coca-Cola exclusive access to the coca plant. Most people are familiar with tales of cocaine being an early ingredient of “Coke” tonic; it’s an era the company makes every effort to bury. Yet coca leaf, the source of cocaine which has been banned in the U.S. since 1914, has been part of Coca-Cola’s secret formula for over one hundred years.
This is a history that spans from cocaine factories in Peru, to secret experiments at the University of Hawaii, to the personal files of U.S. Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger (infamous for his “Reefer Madness” campaign against marijuana, lesser known as a long-time collaborator of The Coca-Cola Company).
A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola tells how one of the biggest companies in the world bypasses an international ban on coca. The book also explores histories of three of the most consumed substances on earth, revealing connections between seemingly disparate icons of modern culture: caffeine, cocaine, and Coca-Cola.
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https://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-Coffee-Coca-Cola/dp/1617751340
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https://www.epicwaterfilters.com/blogs/quick-drips/synthetic-caffeine-vs-natural-caffeine
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https://daily.jstor.org/who-took-the-cocaine-out-of-coca-cola/
The medical profession saw nothing wrong with offering a cocaine-laced cola to white, middle-class consumers. Selling it to Black Americans was another matter.
Cohen writes that Coke was the brainchild of Dr. John Stith Pemberton, who was injured while fighting for the Confederacy and then became addicted to the morphine prescribed for pain relief. Living in Atlanta after the war, the physician tried the new wonder drug cocaine and found it cured his morphine problem. Like many other medical professionals of his time, he identified cocaine as a safe solution to conditions including the “nervousness” that plagued the white middle class—not to mention impotence and sexual dysfunction.
In 1884, Pemberton began selling cocaine-laced wine.
After Atlanta passed a temperance law the next year, he switched gears and started producing a soft drink named for its two key medicinal ingredients—coca leaf and the caffeine-containing African kola nut.
Coca-Cola was an immediate hit at soda fountains, a space catering to middle-class white customers. After Pemberton’s death in 1888, the brand continued to grow under the leadership of his business partner, Asa Grigs Candler.
But, Cohen writes, within just a decade, public attitudes regarding cocaine changed dramatically. This had everything to do with the drug’s adoption by the southern Black working class. Around the time Candler assumed control of Coca-Cola, Black laborers in the New Orleans area began using cocaine to help them get through long, hard days of physical work. Cocaine use spread to workers at plantations and in urban areas around the South. It also became a popular recreational drug in Black and mixed-race neighborhoods.
While the medical profession had seen nothing wrong with tonics such as Coca-Cola advertising themselves to white, middle-class consumers for their aphrodisiac qualities, it became an entirely different matter when Black people used cocaine. Medical journals warned of the “Negro cocaine menace. Newspapers claimed that the drug caused Black men to commit crimes—most notably, raping white women.
Cohen writes that Candler fought back against the damage that cocaine’s declining reputation did to his brand’s reputation, arguing that the small quantity of coca extract in Coke was merely energizing. He also leaned into an emphasis on the soda as a “refreshing” and “great tasting” drink, downplaying its supposed medicinal qualities.
But this strategy became less tenable in 1899, when the company expanded its sales of bottled coke to a national market. This meant that Coca-Cola was now available outside white soda fountains to anyone with a nickel to spare—including Black men.
In 1901, the Atlanta Constitution linked the dangers of Black cocaine use to soft drinks containing the drug, which it claimed could “unconsciously cultivate” a drug habit. That same year, Candler called for a change to the Coca-Cola formula, replacing cocaine with heavier doses of sugar and caffeine—and started denying that the soda had ever contained cocaine to begin with.
Resources
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By: Michael M. Cohen
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Captain Convey Comment
Coca Cola has been “in bed” with the government since the 1890’s.
Coca Cola has had excluse rights to the coca leaf extractions for over 120 years.
Billions are made by the coca cola company selling the cocaine extraction to dentists and big pharma.
Coca cola started out with cocaine in the coca cola drink until about 1901 when it was taken out.
Coca cola still is in the cocaine business but with the US government.
Coca cola makes billions and so does the us government.
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