Who Took the Cocaine Out of Coca-Cola?
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
I suppose it ends up in lidocaine and other variants.
Candler fought back against the damage that cocaine’s declining reputation did to his brand’s reputation, arguing that the small quantity of coca extract in Coke was merely energizing...
But this strategy became less tenable in 1899, when the company expanded its sales of bottled coke to a national market. This meant that Coca-Cola was now available outside white soda fountains to anyone with a nickel to spare—including Black men.”
>"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."[1]
Good to know it's always been like that. Legalize and tax all drugs. Spend the taxes on rehab and clinics instead of the money that will be spent no matter what going to drug lords. It is illogical to have any other drug policy than complete legalization and regulation/taxation.
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
Psylocibin and MDMA are getting established (again after many decades) in psychotherapy in the US.
In general consumption of many hard drugs are tolerated legally and in practice in lot of places around the world.
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That said heroin, homelessness, mental illnesses and addiction are simply things with a "nuisance profile" and has a super high correlation to crime. So it's not surprising they get the prohibition treatment.
which ALWAYS fails. it leads to fentanyl instead of regulated pure heroin which we tax. It leads to the money that could go to put these people in addict centers in to drug lords' pockets. people are going to use it anyway. prohibition does nothing but fill our jails with minorities. Tax it, limit daily use, use the billions flooding to violent cartels to fund social solutions to addiction. It's pretty simple. and undeniable the war on drugs is a failure.
The billions required to build housing-first luxury rehabs with hookers and hypnotherapists for everyone are there ... spent on the War on X (pun maybe intended?) and shipped to warehouses where cartel bosses keep their proceeds.
The whole thing is a clusterfuck of neglect, underfunding, and ... in general short-term thinking or more precisely the relatable but oh-so-wrong "hot heads in the soothing sand" policy.
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[In Seattle] People walking by homeless camps have seen bike "chop shops" there, but the police won't do anything. In the police's defense, on the rare occasions they do arrest homeless people for theft, the county attorney will just drop the charges.
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Oakland PD is the D league of police in the Bay Area. It doesn't have adequate funding and the population is the most hostile. So most A tier cops avoid it, while OPD gets rookies and the leftovers. Then there's the fact that they have half the police they should that similar size+crime cities do. Guess how many police are patrolling at one time among 430k people in the crime that Oakland gets? 200? 100? It's 30! 30 officers to respond to whatever mayhem is going on. One officer busy filing paperwork and driving 2 hours to Dublin jail for every 40,000 people...
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https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-inc...
All while the smarter ones upstream knew it was all a lie and just a way to screw over groups they always wanted to screw over, not even getting in to the benefits their corporate masters gain from the free labor of prisoners who get 20y for dealing something that should be dealt over a regulated counter and the police force to capture those that get caught. All while systemically undermining and undeserving areas who have the most need of social programs. Hopefully logic eventually prevails. as shrooms and dmt become legal in some places i hope we can eventually do the logical thing and stop funding violence and start funding social progress.
Nobody claimed the US was the sole cause of the global war on drugs, but it is a major reason given their stance and political influence.
Drug scene in Soviet Union was massively different then the one in the West. A lot of western drugs were not available and came only with the fall of the Union. The actual issues were alcohol and sniffing. The actual drug scene was something that came with opening of the borders and society needed to adjust.
Soviet Union doing something is not proof that American policy was not what I said. Soviet Union did stuff for own reasons. They did not forbid just drugs either, they forbid half the things existing outside of their borders.
I think the answer to drug use is to make life worth being sober for rather than monkeying around with the law.
"Was Cocaine once an ingredient in Coca-cola?
No, there’s never been any cocaine added in Coca‑Cola and there never will be."
https://www.coca-cola.com/mv/en/about-us/faq/was-cocaine-onc...
Is someone suggesting they would obfuscate their sacred history?
> That same year, Candler called for a change to the Coca-Cola formula, replacing cocaine with heavier doses of sugar and caffeine—and started denying that the soda had ever contained cocaine to begin with.
Coca leaf was, and still is, an ingredient in coca-cola.
So both cocaine and coca-cola are made with coca leaf, but coca-cola is not and never has been made with cocaine.
No one claims cocaine contains coca-cola.
Coca-Cola contained coca leaf contains cocaine (in small amounts?)
Cocaine is made from coca leaf (which does not contain Coca-Cola)
From Wikipedia
"Sugar Free" is based entirely on the amount of sugar per serving size of finished product. It does not care where the sugar came from. Any product that contains less than 0.5 grams of sugar per serving can be labeled "Sugar Free".
This has the fun outcome that tiny candies made entirely of sugar can be sold as "Sugar Free"
Indeed, that was the point of the meraphor. By the same token it is wrong to say origi nal coca-cola was cocaine free.
Before the criminalization of cocaine, however, the extract was not decocainized
So they are right that cocaine was not intentionally added.
But actually cocaine was intentionally added, as a byproduct of adding Coca.
More complete excerpt:
> Before the criminalization of cocaine, however, the extract was not decocainized, and hence Coca-Cola's original formula did indeed include cocaine.
You can still get a buzz off chewing raw coca leaf, but it's not in the same ballpark as doing a line in NYC, SV, or Miami. I recall from Drugs Inc, it's more like a caffeine effect when consumed this way.
The funny thing is that the slideshow at the bottom of the page gives anyone with even a limited knowledge of alkali extraction (like DMT acid-base) everything they need to know about extracting cocaine.
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-ob...
https://www.justthinktwice.gov/article/did-coca-cola-ever-co...
yeah the same way thc is not an ingredient in your roommate's special brownies
The FDA considers caffeine an ingredient in things like soda and energy drinks because it's dosed and added to the beverage. But the FDA doesn't consider the naturally occurring caffeine in coffee beans as an ingredient in something like coffee beans or a canned cold brew. A manufacturer might list caffeine content to help consumers but they aren't required to do so.
Is gluten an ingredient in flour? Not to the FDA but it's still in there. Is sugar an ingredient in fresh squeezed orange juice? No but it's still in there.
coca leaf does contain cocaine; cocaine is not a molecule synthesized from something in the coca leaf in the way that methamphetamine is synthesized from natural pseudoephedrine. the coca leaf contains cocaine in doses significant enough to be psychoactive, which is why people 'chew' it and make tea from it. when people make refined cocaine from coca leaf, they're just concentrating the cocaine already present, not chemically changing it, except that they may change it between the free base alkakoid form and a salt with some anion like chloride
coca-cola, like several other drinks of the era such as vin mariani, contained an extract of coca leaf containing a therapeutically significant dose of cocaine. it is true that it did not contain cocaine as an ingredient, but saying that and then not explaining that it did contain cocaine is lying by omission. in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41135533 bawolff gives the excellent analogy of saying that sugar is not an ingredient in orange juice: true, but the majority of the non-water content of orange juice is still sugar
Idk, just lawyer proof the question as much as possible..
There are plenty of real problems, past and present, which we can point to as indicative of racial prejudice. The insistence on its insertion into other areas, lacking supporting evidence, is, imho, overtly harmful to discourse.
I have not read the book linked as the source of this article, so I'm happy to be shown to be wrong.
There are more serious ones, but most are just used as talking points about how the modern people are smarter and that people in the past were somehow bad people when trialled against their new modern ideals.
100% on this.
Sometimes I feel we are like salt water fish talking about how ridiculous and miserable the fresh water fish in the upstream are.
Drugs, particularly marijuana were a default easy way to get people into the justice system. It requires actual police work and attention to detail to get convictions for behavioral crimes. Possession of weed is easy. Those petit arrests were used to recruit informants and compel testimony.
The decriminalization of marijuana has been pretty transformative and disruptive of policing. There’s good and bad to that, but if we care about justice, it has been a major catalyst.
Plus the article mentions specific writing from the time which supports their view (quote from AJC).
It’s hard to overstate the level of anger white people had toward black people in post-reconstruction Georgia and how fundamental it was to their actions.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that poverty and drug abuse are strongly correlated. Poverty does not cause drug abuse, but people in poverty are more likely to abuse drugs, and people who abuse drugs are more likely to be in poverty due to their drug abuse. The article seems to agree with this point, as it points to working class people as the focal point of abuse of cocaine. In 1900, the white population was approximately 60 million and the black population was approximately 9 million. Casual research suggests that 50% of children were in poverty, which I will extend to suggest that 50% to families were in poverty. Let us; however, assume that only 30% of whites and 100% of blacks were in poverty. In this case, black working-class people were still a minority of working-class people, at a ratio of 2:1.
Under this assumption, is it reasonable to assume that cocaine abuse in non-white communities was the sole catalyst for this change?
So, you've abused drugs and landed yourself in poverty. If you don't stop abusing drugs, you'll stay there (or worse).
Good luck.
no one is putting cocaine in a drink today, so it’s certainly possible that people were starting to figure out that it’s a bad idea.
But what I am saying is that white fear of “anything perceived to be black” was absolutely a driver of behavior at this time/place.
I believe the popular cultural understanding of how bad race relations were at this time is understated.
There is a lack of supporting evidence that race has historically been a deciding factor in US drug policy in the same way that there is a lack of supporting evidence for the historical existence of the Romans.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5614457/
https://www.case.org/system/files/media/file/Penn%20Stater%2...
https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminal...
Having noted my inability to thoroughly research this topic at this time in reply to a sibling post, I'll point to that post for my back of the envelope calculation regarding the number of working class whites versus blacks and suggest that, as poverty and drug abuse seem, to me, linked, that it is just as plausible that widespread abuse of the drug was the catalyst for change in this case.
[0] https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1914-02-1...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26391000?mag=who-took-the-cocai...
While this article confirms my assertion that whites were the majority of drug users, the drug of choice is stated to have been racially segregated (with whites preferring opiates).
Based on this, I'll accept (pending further research) that the southern bans on cocaine were racially motivated. I'd still consider the 1914 federal ban on a wider swath of drugs to be less so.
You spent two paragraphs just to end it with an apprehensive concession at best.
The main difference between the 1914 ban and previous actions was the degree of added emphasis put on caricatures of Chinese people.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/08/14/how-did-...
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,962...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080705050104/http://www.hoover...
https://www.nytimes.com/1914/02/08/archives/negro-cocaine-fi...
But you asked the right question. This article does skip a few steps and assumes you are already subscribed to that causality while not considering anything else or provide supporting evidence, just quips from separate states and cities to reach any conclusion.
0 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26391000?mag=who-took-the-cocai...
That is very unreliable.
The quote was given to Dan Baum in 1994 and talking about events in 1968 - 1971. The quote was revealed in a Harper's Bazaar article in 2016. John Erhlichman died in 1999, and his family denies the quote.
So the original quote was given more than 20 years after the events, and revealed 20 years after the quote (now 40 years after the event) after the person quoted had been dead for 17 years.
The case.org publication clearly states that Anslinger's first-hand exposure to drug addiction as a child in a poor neighborhood that drove his drug policy. After his personal story failed to convince legislators, he used minorities as scapegoats to get drug legislation to pass. His career demonstrates that this was not personal animus against minorities; Anslinger hired several dozen African-American agents at the FBN over the objectives of his staff; the first Chinese-American law-enforcement officer in America (and indeed, is credited as launching one of the first diversity initiatives in the federal government). Also, Anslinger really hated hippies, regardless of race (and most hippies were white), because of their excessive drug use.
The NIH article assumes a racial bias exists in drug policy without bothering to prove it.
Drug policies have had a disparate racial impact but this is not the same thing as having been intended to be based on race. It's simply that different racial groups in the U.S. use drugs to different degrees.
You’re essentially arguing that because he hired a few black DEA agents, his vilification propaganda campaigns and pandering to the Jim Crow crowd in congress to get support wasn’t “intended” to target people based on their race.
You can split hairs that his actions were in conflict with his true feelings I suppose. But additions tend to speak louder than words, and brutal oppression of racial groups motivated by careerism is equally repugnant.
He brutally went after drug dealers and drug users, regardless of race. He pursued WASPs, Catholic mobsters, white hippies, and minorities with equal lack of restraint.
Again, the problem was not racism. The problem was the extreme lengths he was willing to go to quash drugs. And that was driven by the drug use he witnessed as a child, in a white neighborhood.
This is a good undisputed example of race being a key factor in US drug policy. The fact that racial stereotypes and caricatures may have been the second strategy that Anslinger used to achieve his aims is neither here nor there when discussing the historical usage of race in creating and implementing drug policy in the US.
If, for some reason, the topic of the history of race and US drug policy were to be mistaken for the topic of “racism as defined as a fundamentally unknowable specter haunting the heart of Harry Anslinger” then his various hires could be germane. Those are, however, fundamentally different subjects to such a degree that there is no meaningful connection between the two that would make one useful in discussing the other.
We both agree that Anslinger leveraged racial stereotypes in order to achieve his agenda. Race was the tool that ultimately got him the power that he sought. The fact that he failed to gain that power through his own honest accounting of his life story does not in any way serve as proof of anything — certainly not “proof of the opposite” that drug policies were enacted on racial grounds.
It is easy to ponder the inner workings of a man’s soul and mind, as it is easy to project whatever positive or negative motivations on a man. That activity is, however, completely separate from a factual accounting of what a man said, did, and achieved.
Pshaw, if they existed, how come the Internet Archive doesn't have any of their government webpages archived?
It's pretty normal, and helps develop a lot of different perspectives on history so that the bigger picture can be understood in a lot of different ways.
It's fair to call it out, but it's not going anywhere and it's not really a problem in the writing. Taking this history and reconciling it with other accounts is a reader literacy thing.
You should take a similar eye to pretty much all history you run across.
That message was being pushed at a time where the US Senate, controlled by Jim Crow southerners, killed legislation making lynching a federal crime for 50 years. A common pretext for lynching was for a black man to be accused of having sex with, or talking to, a white woman.
Would you mind disclosing in which camp you stand? I need it to confirm if your disregard for discussing racial problems and warning about "harmful discourse" is real or just racism.
I have no problem discussing racial problems. I just didn't see this as one (I've changed that opinion), and didn't appreciate the framing of the article (still don't, but the linked 25 pager is more nuanced).
Finally, I didn't say it was harmful discourse. I said it was "harmful to discourse".
The original recipe coca-cola recipe contained 3/200th of a grain of cocaine per serving, which would be 0.972 mg.
It was then lowered to 1/400th of a grain (0.2 mg) before being eliminated.