Taking The Kick Out of Coke
The Coca-Cola Company's marketing genius over the past century
has given birth to an American myth, a horse and buggy Gilded
Age saga formulated in a laboratory and shrouded in secrecy
equal to the National Security Agency. The company would have us
believe that a little known folksy pharmacist, Dr. John Stith
Pemberton, while poring over his boiling cauldrons, created the
mystery syrup in 1886 to which carbonated water was added and
presto! The most famous soda fountain drink in the history of
the world was born.
In reality John Pemberton, a highly respected Atlanta
businessman with an extraordinary gift for medical chemistry,
imitated a French 'coca wine' formula originally created by a
European chemist. Referring to it as an "invigorator of the
brain," Pemberton claimed it could cure a variety of ailments
from indigestion to nervous disorders and sexual dysfunction.
When the city of Atlanta introduced Prohibition in 1886, he
substituted sugar syrup for the alcoholic wine and called it
Coca-Cola. When Atlanta's prohibition ended in 1887, Pemberton
put the kick back in Coke, calling it "French Wine Coca."
With great respect to Dr. Pemberton, a severely wounded Civil
War veteran addicted to morphine, whose bones rest in a
Columbus, Georgia cemetery, if you dig up a Corsican fellow by
the name of Angelo Mariani, you will uncover another chemist
whose lifelong interests lay in various mind altering
concoctions. Dig deeper and you will discover the truth about
Coke, the birth and evolution of which the Coca-Cola Company has
given very different sworn testimony.
Although Angelo Mariani came from the mountainous island of
Corsica, a dazzling uncut emerald in the Mediterranean, he
decided to make Paris his home, and it is there he experimented
with different coca leaves, which he imported from South
America, green housing thousands of plants for his research.
In the course of his many drug-induced mind journeys, Mariani
discovered that steeping the very purest of coca leaves in
Bordeaux wine disguised the bitterness of the leaf, and produced
an elixir he named "Vin Mariani." The wine became the most
popular 'tonic' of Europe's royals and aristocracy for three
decades. Even our American President, Ulysses S. Grant imported
it. And no wonder since it also contained pure Kola nut
caffeine, which enhanced the effects of the cocaine. Hence, Mr.
Mariani became a very rich man.
Unfortunately for Pemberton, bad health and bad luck followed
him to his grave. Prior to his death in 1888, he had engaged in
some fuzzy maneuvering with a renowned entrepreneur who
purchased the recipe for about $200. When the United States
Eighteenth Amendment went into effect in 1920, national
Prohibition nixed the use of alcohol and it was again removed
from the formula. But the cocaine remained. In copying Mariani's
brainchild, John Pemberton had produced the soda fountain
beverage that bears no resemblance to what is guzzled by the
millions of gallons today.
The original wine ingredients had always been a secret, and so
too were those of Coca-Cola. If you ask the company when exactly
the cocaine was removed (early in the 20th century), they will
tell you it never existed. Where did the name come from? As for
phosphoric acid content, I remember my father using Coke to
clean his car engines. You'd have to be a Kola nut to believe
company hyperbole, or hire multiple lawyers to challenge it and
lose. Yet, due to its storybook mystique and widespread presence
in the remotest backwaters of the planet, Coca-Cola remains
today the most valuable liquid gold on earth.
References:
Atlanta Constitution. "Cocaine Sold Illegally." Nov. 20, 1901,
p. 5.
Atlanta Journal. "A Wonderful Medicine." March 10, 1885.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Cocaine Papers." Ed. Robert Byck/NY
Stonehill Press 1974.
Grinspoon, L&J Bakalar. "Cocaine: A Drug and its Social
Evolution" NY Basic 1976
Kennedy, Joseph. "Coca Exotica." Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson
UN Press 1985
Pendergrast, Mark. "For God, Country and Coca-Cola." NY:
Scribners 1993.
Th. Metzger, 1998 "Who Put the COKE in Coca-Cola?"
Simplicity-Courage-Humor-Soul"