I’m pretty sure it did, but, if so, when did they stop? I’ve searched the SD archive and come up negatory, so I’ll ask all of you peeps.
Also, why did they put it in in the first place? Did they know it was addictive? Hell of a marketing ploy, if you ask me.
Must not have formatted that search properly. Oh well, at least you tried:
Curses! Foiled again! Man, this ALWAYS happens. Oh well, I’ll just crawl back to MPSIMS now.
I used to work in a restaurant whose pantry contained bottles of cooking sherry. (For the record, I am a teetotaler.)
I asked a cook–a friend of my parents–if someone could get drunk on cooking sherry. He said you proably could, but the volume of sherry you’d have to drink to get drunk would probably make you sick from drinking so much of any liquid–even water.
So it is, or was, with Coca-Cola and cocaine. Even when Coca-Cola did] containe bona fide cocaine, by the time you drank enough for a cocaine buzz you’d be sick from drinking so much cola!
Sounds hardly worth the effort, doesn’t it?
And, just FYI for anyone thinking he might go try some cooking sherry, fair warning-it’s salted. The assumption is that you are cooking with it and would add salt anyway, and being salted to the point of being unpalatable on its own allows it to be sold in places that would otherwise be unable to sell alcohol.
According to Poundstone, back when Coca-Cola used cocaine and kola (a nut, somewhat toxic, gives the ‘cola’ flavor, long since synthesized) they were brought to trial. They mixed up a batch without cocaine and kola and gave it to the jury. Nobody could taste the difference between the regular mix and the mix without the controversial ingredients. If there was enough cocaine in there to give a flea a buzz, you’d notice its absence.
U235+n->Rb90+Cs143+3n+165 units/Kg
#!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL $m=unpack(H.$w,$m "\0"x$w);$=echo"16do$w 2+40i0$d+-^1[d2%Sa 2/d0>X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc,s/^.|\W//g,print pack(‘H*’$)while read(STDIN,$m, ($w=2*$d-1+length($n)&~1)/2)
What year are we in?
-sailor
Huh??? 
That’s my sig file. The formula is the reaction that went on in the ‘Little Boy’ bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The code block is an RSA program in three lines of Perl. The quote is a real one from sailor, a regular around here. I enjoy my signature, and I use it often.
If you have cable, check out the History Channel – they’ve been running a multipart special about the history of drugs in America. Coca-Cola is touched on in the series.
The “coke” used in Coca-Cola today is derived from deionized coca leaves – the cocaine has been extracted from the leaves. How much cocaine is in Coca-Cola? Stray molecules, at most. The real buzz is from the caffeine.
your humble TubaDiva
PS For best results in cooking, never use any booze you wouldn’t pour into a glass and drink, “cooking sherry” and the like are just miserable.
Actually, there seems to have been almost as much controversy, a hundred years ago, surrounding the caffeine* in soft drinks. Dr. Harvey Wiley, well known then as the medical columnist of the * Journal of Good Housekeeping*, was a lifelong opponent of caffeine and railed against it in a number of articles. I remember seeing one article about fountain drinks (where most soda was drunk in those days), and he seemed more concerned about
the caffeine than anything else. There was a drawing with a
devilish little imp marked ‘Habit’ crawling out of a glass of cola.
My understanding was that they were brought to trial because they stopped using cocaine… is that true?
Mr2001:
You’ve almost hit upon the Catch-22 the Federal Government thought they had Coca-Cola in. You see, if they had a substantial amount of cocaine in their mix, they’d be brought up on drug charges. But if they didn’t have any cocaine in their soda, they would be brought up on truth-in-advertising charges. According to Big Secrets by William Poundstone, the trial, called United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, featured an interview of Dr. L. Schaeffer where he described Merchandise No. 5, the ingredient that contains the coca (cocaine-bearing leaves) and the kola (the toxic nut). To cut a long interview short, they decocanize the coca leaves with tulol, a solvent, and then they mix the powdered, decocanized coca leaves with the powdered kola nuts and, in the original process, some California white wine. This makes Coca-Cola syrup about 2 proof. The wine has been since dropped in favor of a water-alcohol mix of the same strength. Anyway, the decocanization process is very effective. Even before the coca was decocanized (they started in 1903) the amount of cocaine was trifling. It was measured at 0.04 grain (a whopping 2.6 milligrams), not enough to get a flea hopping, back in those heady, pre-decocanization days. These days, there isn’t enough cocaine in Coca-Cola to even talk about.
Cecil refers to the “Old Cola Drinkers.”
Wonder if they worship at the Old Catholic churches.
I once did a report on this very subject in school. I fancy myself knowing a fair bit, but you wouldn’t believe how many people argue with me that there is even today still Coke in COke.
Drives me crazy to argue with the unscientific mind sometimes.
Just for the record, “Cola” nuts don’t give Coke or other colas their flavor. Coca Cola added its flavorings (vamilla, cinnamon/cassia, citrus oil, and “other” oils) to COVER UP the bitter taste of cola and coca. Look a little closer at Poundstone’s chapter on Coca Cola in Big Secrets. The “fantasia” blend was always intended as a cover-up. This, by the way, pretty much proves that Pepsi, RC, et al. essentially ripped off Coke’s formula, simply modifying it a bit. You might also want to look at “For God, Country, and Coca Cola”, a recent history of Coke that has been updated. His formula for Coke pretty much agrees with Poundstone’s
Let me second the recommendation for Mark Pendergrast’s book For God, Country, and Coca Cola. Thoroughly researched and endlessly fascinating. If you’re interested in stuff like the coca content of early sodas and “patent” drinks in general, you’ll find everything you need there. And along the way, you learn other interesting tidbits, such as Iceland being one of the major consumers of Coca Cola, in part because of the plant that was located there to produce the fizzy concoction for American GIs in Europe during WWII.
Yeah, I did read up on the fantasia flavor covering up the kola nut and the coca leaf. But that really wasn’t the object of the question, so I didn’t spend time on it. It makes a point, though: Sodas are just patent medicines (snake oils) dressed up in different clothes.