Coca-Cola has been a great soft drink for decades. Pepsi tightened things up in the mid-80s with aggressive advertising campaigns and the hiring of celebrities to act as brand ambassadors, but Coca-Cola has continued to dominate the soft drink segment. And in addition to being refreshing thanks to the carbonated water, it also had other effects because of the famous formula used. Erythroxylum cocabetter known as coca leaf.

This allowed the drink to be sold in pharmacies, but a portion of the population was not allowed access to Coca-Cola because of the stimulant effects of coca. It was acceptable for whites to drink Coke, but not for blacks.

And because of one of the many stories of racism in countries like the United States, Coca-Cola was changed forever, almost in the blink of an eye.

Miracle Medicine Tonic

John Stith Pemberton is the inventor of Coca-Cola. At least the earliest version. He was a Civil War veteran who, like many other soldiers, became addicted to morphine because it was the only thing that dulled the pain of his wounds. Pemberton was a chemist and in 1884 he began marketing a beverage called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca (or Pemberton French Coca Wine).

This was a version of the wine that contained coca leaves, but the bad news was that just a year later, his home state of Atlanta reinstated the ban. This obstacle to alcohol sales led Pemberton to develop a nonalcoholic version of his wine.

It wasn’t long before he invented the first Coca-Cola a few months later. It was a mixture of coca leaves, kola nuts, and carbonated water. Without thinking twice, John offered the product to pharmacies so they could sell it on the grounds of its medicinal properties. And he was right.

Coca has been used for its analgesic, antidiarrheal, antioxidant or digestive properties, among many others. Coke also has digestive and diuretic properties and acts as a cardiotonic. Both are now They have stimulant properties for the central nervous system. and in very high doses they may cause depression, insomnia, excitement or tachycardia.

But in 1886 there was already the name ‘Coca-Cola’, the logo had two capital ‘C’s’, the font Spencerian They began to be sold in pharmacies for five cents a piece. Pemberton said,Valuable brain tonic that cures headaches, relieves fatigue and calms the nervesMoreover, he marketed it as a ‘delicious, refreshing, joyful, stimulating and invigorating’ drink. He fooled us with its ingredients.

Pemberton sold nine a day the first year, but as Coca-Cola himself claimed, he never realized the true potential of the drink. He gradually sold off parts of his business to various partners, and in 1888 he sold his shares in Coca-Cola to Asa G. Gandler, a businessman who gradually took complete control of the company. Sales were $300, up from nearly $10,000 today.

Remember when we talked about Pemberton’s addiction to morphine? It’s logical to think that the inventor of something as popular as Coca-Cola would die a well-off man, but the truth is that he died in 1888 at the age of 57. He did this in absolute poverty Declaring bankruptcy, he fell victim to stomach cancer and was still addicted to morphine. Pemberton had a son who had a stake in the company, but he sold his stake because he wanted the money, and it wasn’t long before he died (again from opium addiction).

Racist Coca-Cola

OK, there’s a lot of background context, but I think it was important to know where we came from, how Coca-Cola was introduced, and that the two main ingredients in Coca-Cola at the time were nervous system stimulants. Now things start to get dark.

The United States had become concerned about certain drugs. In 1875, San Francisco tried—unsuccessfully—to ban whites from frequenting opium dens in Chinese immigrant communities, and interestingly enough, the racist (and sexist) undertone was the fear that a white woman would fall into the hands of the “public.” The reasons were not without merit:

“Many women and girls, as well as young people from respectable families, were persuaded to visit opium dens in China, where they were morally and otherwise ruined.”

This is something that author Michael Cohen exemplifies in his work Race, Coca-Cola and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition, and what he sought was not racial mixing between white women and Chinese immigrants, but an altered state caused by opium. Something similar happened with Coca-Cola and its ‘cocaine’ (which was not cocaine, as it was more natural than the chemical, but had similar effects in large quantities).

Doctors were not keen on white people consuming tonics like Coca-Cola. In fact, one of the first commercial posters featuring the perfectly recognizable Coca-Cola logos showed a young, apparently model white woman with a small glass of the drink. Cocaine also didn’t seem to worry the authorities, as long as white people were using it.

The problem was that black, Mexican, and Chinese immigrants were coming to the United States. They were working in jobs that white people didn’t want: construction, farming, and so on. Cocaine use is on the rise among black workers fields and urban areas of the south. It became popular as a recreational drug, but also as a stimulant to endure hard workdays.

Medical journals gradually began to warn of the dangers of cocaine among black men, stating that it was driving them to commit crimes and rape white women.

Coca-Cola machines for whites

Apparently, in a society like the United States in the late 19th century, this was such an earthquake that Candler (who controlled Coca-Cola) began to debate the amount of coca in Coca-Cola. It was so small that it served no purpose other than to give energy, defeating the medicinal qualities of Pemberton’s earlier speech.

Cohen writes that in 1899, during the Coca-Cola boom, Candler decided: It was time to enter the national marketCoca-Cola would go from being a whites-only beverage sold in drug stores and soda shops to being bottled and available ubiquitously throughout the United States.

Blacks now had easy access to the drink, but Atlanta moved quickly and in 1901 linked the dangers of cocaine use by the black population to the effects of soft drinks containing the drug. Coca-Cola had bottle dispensers for whites only, but due to segregation there were others for blacks (because business is business), but as we said the authorities were not happy about it one bit.

They confirmed with their noses, why not say it, that Coca-Cola consumption could cause blacks to unconsciously develop drug addiction. That’s when Candler saw the real danger and demanded changes to the Coca-Cola formula: He replaced the Coke with more sugar and caffeine. In addition, Cohen claims that Candler began denying that the soda contained cocaine.

And it wasn’t cocaine but… the coca leaf was there in the original formula, wow. But hey, if there wasn’t all this history of racism, it would be interesting how long the medical authorities would have allowed Coca-Cola to have these natural ingredients. But when you factor in the huge amounts of sugar, it’s worth analyzing which formula is more harmful, the original or the updated one.

Images | Library of Congress

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