Original publication: August 1977.
THE Coca-Cola CONSPIRACY
To conquer the world… with cocaine!
By John Graff
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 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—long 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 …
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Author: High Times Vault / High Times
