You can get a soft drink in Colombia or Bolivia containing non-decocainized coca leaves as ingredients today.
The Stepan company in New Jersey is the only licensed importer of coca leaves in the US. They decocainize the leaves, removing the methyl benzoyl ecgonine (C17H21NO4) and then sell the remaining leaves to the Coca-Cola company for flavor.
Cocaine is also a schedule 2 substance, meaning it is actually approved and sold for medical use. Not a lot, mind you, and mostly only in hospital settings for local anaesthesia purposes, but it was absolutely found in the catalogs we used to use for doing the ordering when I worked as a pharmacy technician.
Local and global anesthesia use it often, actually even though you'd think it's the anesthesiologist that uses it (because they are known to be drug fiends) usually it's the surgeon who makes use of cocaine. I remember in my medical training that old surgeon Dr. Jackson, he'd have that thick moustache that'd always look like it'd been dragged through flour. But then he'd say "let me show you how to do surgery young paduans" and I'll be damned if he didn't perform 18 whipples, 13 trepinations, and 32 colonostomies in an hard-drivin' 48 hour continuous surgery jamboree
I think it's also used by dentists. I tried to find photos of the packaging at one point but couldn't find anything. I'm more than a little bit curious how the pharma packaging looks.
TL; DR “While the medical profession had seen nothing wrong with tonics such as Coca-Cola advertising themselves to white, middle-class consumers for their aphrodisiac qualities, it became an entirely different matter when Black people used cocaine...
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.”
>"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
>"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.
As a non-American, I think that you’re underestimating or understating the US’s unfortunate influence on the rest of the world. It’s almost like they’ve been fighting for it for hundreds of years.
It was literal American policy to pressure other countries to do so. I mean an open one - not a secret, but something American politicians were proud about. It was seen as a good thing by them and by the voters.
Soviet Union did not had all drug war in this sense.
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.
Germany recently moved a big step toward legalizing pot.
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.
Yes, yes, exactly. Thank you for following up with this! I got disillusioned, burnt out, fucking fed up and let down almost all at the same time after reading the comments here. (Especially about how everything is just bad, fucked up, suboptimal, prime broken windows example, and so on.)
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...
Great addition. the massive misallocation of a militarized police is another source to solve these problems. But unfortunately for too long the conservative mindset of "punish the addict" has provided the electoral support that led to anti drug legislation prevailing over plain reason.
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.
Not to mention the destruction of any trace of an actually productive economy in these areas. Prison labor is anything but free. It's extremely inefficient, ridiculously subsidized by public funds (direct costs of the whole criminal-justice system, removing people from the labor force, the cost of lack of rehabilitation, etc.)
coca-cola's statement is technically true but intentionally misleading, and a lot of people are commenting based on the misconception that coca leaf doesn't contain cocaine
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
It's like a fruit juice saying "no added sugar". They don't add any sugar to the juice but it's definitely not sugar-free. Same with old coke, they never added cocaine but it wasn't cocaine-free.
From TFA: “That same year [1901], 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.”
It depends on how you define an "ingredient" and "made with". Was pure cocaine added to the original Coca-Cola during manufacturing? No. Was cocaine one of the naturally occurring substances in coca leaf extract that was put in Coke? Yes.
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.
It's correct to say the processed powdery form of cocaine was never 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.
You cannot market orange juice as sugar free. Only "No sugar added"
"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"
Disagree, it's like saying that jet fuel doesn't have plastic in it. They're both made from crude oil but they are totally different and do not contain one another.
Coca-Cola is still made with coca leaf, but today, it's decocainized. (And since it's impossible to remove 100% of the cocaine molecules from the coca leaf, Coca-Cola still contains extremely tiny trace amounts of cocaine.)
> 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.
Every time I've taken the tour at the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, the question has come up and they consistently deny it. I think next time I'll ask the question as whether or not Coco leaves were included in the original formula. I'll bet I get the wrong answer.
"Is it true that prior to aggressive anti-drug legislation, the cocoa leaf extract that was used in coca-cola was not specifically de-cocainized thereby causing coca-cola to possibly contain quantities of cocaine that were possibly significant to the consumer?"
Idk, just lawyer proof the question as much as possible..
While framed as a "black and mixed-race working class vs white middle class" conflict, the remainder of the article suggests that burgeoning recreational use of the pure drug informed removal of that drug from a drink where it was included in sub-therapeutic doses (9mg/drink vs 50-75mg in a recreational "dose" [0]). It's unclear to me, as written, how race was causal and why it's included as in the article.
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.
>The insistence on its insertion into other areas, lacking supporting evidence, is, imho, overtly harmful to discourse.
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.
I counter with this article [0], which I believe to be more historically relevant due to its closeness in time to the discussion in question. Race is not mentioned as a factor here, and cocaine is described as "the American habit".
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.
I am not clear on how an article that does not overtly tie race to drug use or policy is in any way supportive of the notion that the historical record does not contain supportive evidence of a link between race and drug policy in the United States. This article also does not mention escalators but I would not submit it to further a claim that there is no historical evidence of them existing.
I didn't suggest that there is no supportive evidence between race and drug policy, but that fact does not imply that there is a causal relationship in this case. Citing Nixon era documents to describe pre-WWI circumstances is evidence at least as poor as that which I presented.
The article itself cites in the first paragraph this much more detailed analysis of the topic, which may provide the historical context that you felt was lacking.
Thank you for this reference. I had overlooked it.
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.
I’m not sure why someone would pick the 1914 ban as being uniquely not racially influenced. That seems arbitrary and could mostly only be backed up by not reading about it.
The main difference between the 1914 ban and previous actions was the degree of added emphasis put on caricatures of Chinese people.
Yes, it is class based, and given the more quantifiable efforts to relegate black populations to an underclass along with everyone else already there, it is always 99% correlated to race when looking at that subset.
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.
The eji article talks about the John Ehrlichman quote.
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.
>After his personal story failed to convince legislators, he used minorities as scapegoats to get drug legislation to pass.
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.
When people are claiming that drug policy is racially motivated, proof of the opposite is very much on point. Anslinger was very open about the fact that his childhood in poverty was behind his extreme anti-drug stance, not some supposed racism that didn't exist until marijuana activists tried to rewrite history in the 1970s.
You are conflating what you think is a commentary on Anslinger’s internal values with what is a factual statement about the history of drug policy in the US.
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.
I think that you’re taking the most charitable view of Anslinger’s conduct possible.
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.
Even worse, the guy is exactly making the point that it is exactly about race. Heck the dude himself may not have been racist, he clearly used systemic racism to get drug laws passed. That exactly is what racism is. If nothing about the system was racist, the associating it with black strategy would not have worked
Except that he didn't brutally oppress racial groups...
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.
Racism was involved in some drug prohibition laws, certainly. But to steel man the comment you’re replying to, the article mainly points to circumstantial links rather than identifying a smoking gun. A quote about why cocaine was removed, for example, might have made it stronger. Or maybe ruling out other possibilities, like a spike in the import cost of coca leaves.
People write about history through the lens of their specialty and personal interests, which is what the author of the underlying article was doing when they published in their academic journal, Southern Culture. The author has a lot of insight and foreknowledge into their field of expertise and can situate this story within that context better than others can, and more deeply (probably) than they could do in some other context.
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.
This is all well and good, except we all know the current zeitgeist is to go to any length necessary to frame absolutely everything in terms of race. As a reader, it's hard to distinguish between that and genuine academic interest. I now tend to close the tab the moment race is mentioned. I'm glad I don't live in the USA, it must be awful.
One of the core concepts used to push anti-marijuana campaigns was that marijuana would enable black men to seduce innocent young white woman, and create a mixed race.
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.
I’m not an expert on the origins of Coke, but I do find it very plausible that white people in 1890’s Atlanta heard that “black people are doing it” and that was enough.
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.
I don't have the time to do the research justice at this moment; however, let me lay out a rough argument.
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?
My drug use has stopped when Im at my poorest simply because I can’t afford it. Without some sources I’m not even willing to get past your first premise.
> 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.
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 don't believe in camps (with regards to allying myself with one — obviously they exist). I believe in seeking truth (to the extent possible) through discourse. See the rest of this thread for how I conduct that process and what I do when confronted with reasonable evidence.
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".
There’s a recent and ongoing concerted effort to push that narrative in the US that can be observed directly in book bans and school board fights about curriculums. Florida is an interesting contemporary example of a new history being mandated and previously mundane and uncontested accounts being declared ahistorical.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/floridas-new-africa...
Slavery seems to be very "American" even though it's not. A lot of ideas and movements during BLM supported the narrative that certain figures were crazy racists. OP mentions about how illicit drugs were all just tools used to control minorities and are still used that way..
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.
I don't think anyone would suggest that slavery was an exclusively american concept, but there are ways that slavery impacted america and is still impacting america that i don't think is true of other first world countries (e.g. how financially dependent early america was on it, how late in history relative to other countries it was abolished, how it was one of the causes of the civil war, which in turn significantly shaped america, etc)
> 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.
Wow fascinating article and worth the read. Didn’t know the Cola part comes from the caffeine containing kola leaf. Also funny to see a different Michael Cohen than the one currently in news…
Furthermore the title made me think of the song “Who put the bomp” [1].
I think of Coca-Cola and soda fountains as more a post ww2 thing but very interesting to learn it’s much older, into the 19th century.
Also so fascinating to hear about cocaine curing someone from a morphine addiction.
