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Wooden six-pack carrying case from the 1930s with, from left: two 1930s bottles, an Arabic Coca-Cola and a Coke from an independent bottler, pre-1915. Coca-Cola antiques supplies by Speakeasy Antiques. New York. N.Y. and Sarsaparilla Antiques, New York, N.Y. Photo by H. Randolph Graff. Home » Culture Culture Flashback Friday Flashback Friday: The Coca-Cola Conspiracy Published: August 21, 2020 9:30 am High Times Share 48 Min Read SHARE Switch to Light Mode From the pages of the August, 1977 issue of High Times comes John Graff’s story about the origins of the all-American soft drink. Everybody knows that once upon a time Coca-Cola really did contain cocaine, although almost nobody now alive can recall the taste and effects of “the real thing.” But during its Heroic Age, which lasted from 1886 to 1903, Coke was hailed as the salvation of the world and a wonder drug for man, woman and beast; it was first sold as a brain tonic and sure cure for alcoholism, headache, neuralgia, hysteria, melancholy and a host of afflictions both nervous and mucous. With the dawn of the [20th] century, Coca-Cola became a target of prohibitionists, nutritionists and Southern Methodists convinced that the blend of cocaine and caffeine was distilled in hell and drunk at the cost of your soul, if not your stomach. The outcry against Coke rings down through the decades—along with the court-stopping stunts of corporate lawyers who downed straight snorts of caffeine as well as bottled dead rats, roaches and black widow spiders to demonstrate the purity of their stockholders’ concoction. Today Coca-Cola is sipped, slurped and swallowed over 200 million times a day. Coca-Cola paid a high price for its success in 1903, when the company bowed its head before the tidal wave of anticocaine-cola-ism and withdrew the psychoactive cocaine alkaloid from the featured coca ingredient of their fabulously popular soft drink. But today, as a result of overwhelming clinical evidence that cocaine is a “benign recreational drug” when used in moderation, and of mounting pressure on lawmakers to modify the 74-year-old ban on coke, the secret ingredient may be due for a comeback. Clearly, it’s time to take a pause that refreshes and review the strange history of social upheaval, religious hysteria and legal, political and medical log-rolling and buck-passing that drove cocaine underground while making the first company to mass-market it a highly successful, multinational corporation. When Coca-Cola first appeared in the spring of 1886, America was at its pinnacle of enthusiasm for the leaf of the Andean coca plant and its by-products. Preparations made from whole leaf coca extracts were among the fastest-selling nostrums in the booming patent medicine industry. American physicians were in love with coca’s remarkable effectiveness in a number of therapeutic applications: as a general tonic and stimulant, for fatigue, headache, loss of appetite, digestive disorders, sore throat, hay fever, asthma, catarrh, high blood pressure, nervous disorders, melancholia and many more. One of the most highly publicized uses of coca in the United States during the early 1880s was the one that attracted the attention of Sigmund Freud. The young neurologist described this uniquely American coca in Uber Coca (1884): “Coca was tried in America for the treatment of chronic alcoholism at about the same time as it was introduced in connection with morphine addiction (1878). and most reports dealt with the two uses conjointly. In the treatment of alcoholism, too, there were cases of undoubted success, in which the compulsion to drink was either banished or alleviated.” Soon after Freud made this observation, coca did acquire an immense popularity in this country as a treatment for alcoholism. By far the most widely used coca preparation at the time was an imported French product, Vin Mariani—a red Bordeaux liberally laced with whole leaf extract of coca. As more and more doctors began using Mariani’s wine to wean their patients from the horrors of alcohol and opium, a number of American drug manufacturers came out with Mariani spin-offs and by the turn of the century there were over a hundred different brands of coca wine available. Coca-Cola was a direct descendant of this specific form of coca wine therapy. It was intentionally formulated to provide the same coca cure as the wines did but in a nonalcoholic, nonintoxicating syrup base. It was meant to be a drink that could help free the slaves of “drink.” It was, in fact, the southern-based temperance movement that created the environment and the need for Coca-Cola. The South had a heavy booze problem during Reconstruction. The post-Civil War years were marked with widespread depression and despair. Fortunes were lost, the economy wrecked and much of the land devastated. Many a proud reb chose to drown his sorrows rather than try to get it all together again. Then too, there were plenty of wounded vets around who faithfully hung ...

Flashback Friday: The Coca-Cola Conspiracy | High Times