Any proverbial "schoolboy" who's been around in one iteration or another for the last two centuries knows that there was a time when the soft drink (re: soda/pop, compensating for adorable regional dialects) the world has long loved best - Coca-Cola - was actually produced with its namesake drug.
Of course, today (and for some time now, so don't panic, you fun-foiling Right Wingers out there!) Coke (the drink) can get you no more high than fellow speed-inducing beverages Red Bull, Jolt, and Dr. Pepper. (Although, you'll find Kombucha can ferment into a state of being rendered alcoholic... but let's leave that be for now.)
Since we of course know the reason why Coca-Cola was originally made with cocaine - more or less the same impetus for why Freud was prescribing blow to all of his patients (and more and more to himself) as a miracle cure-all for the blues (and just about everything else)... not to mention why Starbucks makes sure to over-caffeinate their coffee to the degree that you find yourself needing to purchase from the green awning'd neighborhood chain - the real quandary becomes: "Why did they take it out?"
What person better to solve the age-old problem for us than The Atlantic's own Health Editor, James Hamblin, who earlier this morning gave us the goods.
Hamblin begins his incisive article with a pithy rationale for why we (at least initially) just couldn't get enough Coca-Cola: "When cocaine and alcohol meet inside a person, they create a third unique drug called cocaethylene. Cocaethylene works like cocaine, but with more euphoria."
Got it. Again, we already know cocaine makes people happy... for a while... before they crash their broken-down Nissan Sentra into a ditch and begin running around the car half-blitzed out of their mind ranting about the woman who broke their hearts, all the while not noticing the blood streaming down their faces.
After noting some of the more famous imbibers of truly "Classic" Coca-Cola - Alexander Dumas, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Pope Leo XIII - Hamblin reveals that it was at first the alcohol in Coca-Cola that forced creator Dr. John Stith Pemberton to find his drink prohibited (presciently, thirty-four years before the 18th Amendment, no less).
Being a brainy doctor, though, Pemberton would not be stifled and overcame the Georgia county prohibition law by replacing the French wine in his drink with a sugar-syrup that suddenly made his Coca-Cola the "temperance drink" (crafty PR, Doc!) of 1886.
The new Coke formula of Sugar + Cocaine became the delight of the white intelligentsia, Hamblin goes on to say, resulting in some racial tensions when Pemberton's company began bottling the drink and thus suddenly granting access to minorities who were barred from segregated Coca-Cola-dispensing soda fountains.
Everything becomes unsightly familiar after that, Hamblin tells us. With more and more "recreational" cocaine use (you know, as opposed to its being used for medicinal purposes, wink-wink) on the rise (it wouldn't be illegal for nearly twenty years of Coke's being on the market), it was so much easier to point a finger to the snifter stuff for the wild antics those crazy kids were getting into at the turn of the twentieth century.
And, as always, the minorities were the first to be blamed.
"The use of cocaine by the negroes of the South is one of the most elusive and troublesome questions which confront the enforcement of the law ... often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the negroes." This was actually stated by US Statement Department official in 1910, corroborated by a Dr. Edward Williams who, in The Medical Standard, opined that the "negro who has become a cocaine-doper" has also become a menace to society, particularly by his being emboldened with "Dutch courage" (whatever the heck that might be).
Well, as history (and Hamblin) has shown, there's nothing like a little racial prejudice to move the tides of political reform, and thus by 1929, Coca-Cola was rid of its "Dutch courage"-inducing drug (though it still has a brand of coca in it even today, minus its cocaine-forming ecgonine alkaloid component).
For those wondering, Hamblin's essay on Coca-Cola had no comment about just what it is that makes Pepsi, meanwhile, nearly as beloved.
Follow @profklickberg
