There used to be a medicine called Hadacol, which has been immortalized in song. It was an open secret that the stuff was used mostly for recreational purposes. I’m curious what had become of the stuff, and just what exactly was in it. Help me out here.
Some things aren’t what they seem
By JIM WICKER
I’m not sure when it came on the market, but I first heard of Hadacol, a so-called health tonic, during a radio-advertising blitz in the late 1940s.
At the time, I was a fourth-grader and I didn’t pay much attention to commercials as such. But Hadacol’s were catchy and aired so frequently that almost no one could avoid them. They were noticeable, like Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” TV spots a few years ago.
It appeared that everyone heard the Hadacol ads except the deaf and the few hermits who wouldn’t have listened to radios anyhow. Nearly everyone soon began talking about the mysterious tonic, even to the extent of repeating some of the claims being broadcast.
The Hadacol claims were blatantly overstated. If Hadacol had been half as miraculous as the commercials declared, we might never have needed much of anything else. The government could have canceled Social Security because Hadacol would’ve kept most Americans healthy, peppy and working into their 90s or longer.
If the stuff had been genuine and was still available, I’d pour a bottle in my car’s gas tank today.
But like many other too-good-to-be-true products, Hadacol turned out to be considerably less than the hype had made it out to be. Almost as suddenly as they began, the Hadacol commercials stopped, and I heard my relatives and some teachers say the government had forced the stuff off the market.
The talk I heard may or may not have been based on facts, but the allegations were that the feds’ action took place after they discovered that Hadacol’s main ingredient was alcohol — the kind that the dudes in Tennessee and Kentucky make to put a little kick in cocktails and such.
Several years later, I thought about the brief Hadacol era when I heard that some hippies with a yen for baking were making cookies that contained marijuana or hashish as primary ingredients.
I never saw or tasted any of their freaky baked goods, so I can’t provide a description or critique. But I do know that for obvious reasons the purveyors of “love grass,” as the freaks called marijuana, never advertised their cookies in the newspapers or on radio and television.
But I suspect that the Hadacol crackdown and the occasional arrests of hippies caught nibbling on funny cookies helped make Americans more conscious of the ingredients of the products they buy and consume. Through the years, I’ve noticed more and more people pausing to read labels on canned and boxed foods in supermarkets.
Of course I could be mistaken; maybe most of the shoppers are stopping instead to try to figure out the prices of the bar-coded items they’re contemplating buying.
I suspect, though, that the fuss the feds made about the hippies’ marijuana cookies inspired a cartoonist for one of the slick men’s magazines to produce what I considered a truly funny cartoon during the ’60s era. You know it must have been good because nearly 40 years have passed and I still remember it.
The cartoon was simple enough: It showed the likeness of a smirking Col. Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame being led handcuffed out of a KFC restaurant by two hefty, uniformed policemen. The caption had one of the cops saying, “We finally figured out what some of your 11 secret herbs and spices are.”
Of course, I laughed, but in reality Col. Sanders, whom I met once in Durham, was a super good fellow who would never have put anything impure in his fried chicken.
If it weren’t for my wife Carole’s fried chicken, the Colonel’s would be tops with me.
Jim Wicker is a reporter for the Times-News. His column appears Tuesdays and Fridays.
HOPE THIS HELPS. IT’S ALL I COULD FIND ON THE SUBJECT
It’s an interesting anecdote, but it doesn’t help much. All I’ve found on the web was that there’s now a country band named Hadacol. And one book at our library has pictures of Hadacol ads.
But wait! Somebody is selling a bottle of Hadacol on eBay! I wonder how old it is. http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=441875770
It was about 40 proof alcohol, among other things.
Arjuna34
check this thread for more info:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=9756