When cocaine and alcohol meet inside a person, they create a third unique drug called cocaethylene. Cocaethylene works like cocaine, but with
more euphoria. So in 1863, when Parisian chemist Angelo Mariani combined coca and wine and started selling it, a butterfly did flap its wings. His Vin Marian became extremely popular. Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, and Arthur Conan Doyle were among literary figures said to have used it, and the chief rabbi of France
said, "Praise be to Mariani's wine!" Pope Leo XIII
reportedly carried a flask of it regularly and gave Mariani a medal.
Seeing this commercial success, Dr. John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta, himself a
morphine addict following an injury in the Civil War, set out to make his own version. He called it Pemberton's French Wine Coca and marketed it as a panacea. But as Pemberton's business started to take off, a prohibition was passed in his county in Georgia (a local one that predated the 18th Amendment by 34 years). Soon French Wine Coca was illegal because of the alcohol, not the cocaine.
Pemberton remained a step ahead, though. He replaced the wine in the formula with, healthier, sugar syrup. His new product debuted in 1886: "Coca-Cola: The temperance drink." After that, as Grace Elizabeth Hale recounted recently in the
The New York Times, Coca-Cola "quickly caught on as an 'intellectual beverage' among well-off whites." But when the company started selling it in bottles in 1899, minorities who couldn't get into the segregated soda fountains suddenly had access to it. Anyone with a nickel, could now drink the cocaine-infused beverage.
Cocaine wasn't even illegal until 1914, 11 years after Coca-Cola's change, but a
massive surge in cocaine use was at its peak at the turn of the century. Recreational use increased five-fold in a period of less than two decades.
The Coca-Cola we know today still contains coca but the
ecgonine alkaloid is removed from it. Perfecting that extraction took until 1929, so before that there were still trace amounts of coca's psychoactive elements in Coca-Cola. As Dominic Streatfield describes in
Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, the extraction is now done at a New Jersey chemical processing facility by a company called Stepan. In 2003, Stepan imported 175,000 kilograms of coca for Coca-Cola. That's enough to make more than $200 million worth of cocaine. They refer to the
coca leaf extract simply as "Merchandise No. 5."
"Merchandise No. 5?" I wonder how much is in:
7UP?
