by Lydia Kang
Pemberton started by extracting cocaine from coca, an ancient plant popular in South America and recently embraced in France as a stimulant and cure-all in the form of coca wine (more on that later). Soon he had concocted a homegrown American alternative to French coca wine, an alcoholic, cocaine-laced drink that he took to Atlanta to sell.
That buzzy little drink he patented was called Coca-Cola.
Nature’s Stimulant: From the Andes to Austria
Cocaine—“the caviar of street drugs” and one of the most popular recreational drugs on the planet—has been employed as a stimulant since at least 3000 bce. Cocaine is derived from the Erythroxylum coca plant, native to the Andean mountains of South America. The plant looks decidedly normal, almost innocent, just another shrub in a sea of shrubby plants. But that little shrub, which wouldn’t look out of place in your landscaped yard, has made countless fortunes and ruined countless lives.
The leaves of the coca plant were widely chewed by the Inca in Peru for their stimulative effect, a practice that was summarily banned by Spain’s Catholic Church after the arrival of the conquistadores in the sixteenth century.
Their plan, however, didn’t work out very well. Frequent and large-scale use of coca leaves eventually forced the Spanish colonial government to concede defeat. As one conquistador wrote in 1539:
Coca, which is the leaf of a small tree that resembles the sumac found in our own Castile, is one thing that the Indians are ne’er without in their mouths, that they say sustains them and gives them refreshment, so that, even under the sun they feel not the heat, and it is worth its weight in gold in these parts, accounting for the major portion of the tithes.
Coca use was endemic. Eventually, the Spanish just said screw it and started getting high on the leaves themselves. They also began to tax and regulate its sale and use, an intelligent strategy of narcotic governance.
Conquistadores also brought coca leaves back with them to Europe, where they were almost totally ignored because of all the shiny gold and silver that was loading down their ships. It didn’t help that if any coca leaves in a bunch get moist, the whole batch will quickly rot, which was a particular challenge for ship transport. So it took a while for the rest of Europe to start investigating those funny leaves from South America.
As the science of alkaloid extraction advanced in the early nineteenth century, however, it was inevitable that someone would eventually turn their attention to the leaves of the coca shrub. In 1859, a large quantity made its way to Germany and into the hands of a bright young doctoral student named Albert Niemann, who was in need of a thesis. The graduate student decided to try extracting the active ingredient from coca leaves. He succeeded, isolating cocaine and earning his doctorate degree in one fell swoop, all the while becoming the first and last person to earn an advanced degree for creating a highly addictive recreational drug. (And if creating cocaine wasn’t a terrible enough legacy, the twenty-six-year-old doctor began experimenting with ethylene and sulfur dichloride, eventually inventing mustard gas and killing himself in the process.)
The same year that Niemann was extracting cocaine, an Italian doctor named Paolo Mantegazza also became enamored of the coca plant, traveling to Peru and enthusiastically volunteering himself as a lab rat for testing the effects of coca leaf doses. Not one to shy away from extremes, Mantegazza diligently recorded his reaction to small, moderate, high, and ridiculously high doses of coca leaves. He noticed his reduced hunger and improved energy on small and moderate doses and commented happily on the “rush” he received from large doses, writing:
I sneered at the poor mortals condemned to live in this valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the spaces of 77,438 words, each more splendid than the one before… . God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effects of coca all life long. I would rather live a life of ten years with coca than one of 100,000 (and here I inserted a line of zeroes) without it.
Such enthusiasm, published by Mantegazza in his pamphlet “On the Hygienic and Medical Values of Coca,” did not go unnoticed by the European populace. And he’s right, cocaine does make its user feel supremely confident, decisive, and full of energy—all of which are useful traits for many professions.
It’s no surprise that cocaine use became popular among intellectuals, artists, writers, and other people who relied upon a highly functioning brain for their work output. The most famous advocate of cocaine as a stimulant in the nineteenth century was none other than Sigmund Freud, who became an all-out addict in his twenties and thirties. Freud wrote to a colleague in 1895 after “a cocainization of the left nostril,” that “in the last few days I have felt unbelievably well, as though everything had been erased… . I have felt wonderful, as though there had never been anything wrong at all.” Freud quit by the time he was forty, before he wrote the major works of psychology that have turned him into a household name. Scholars still debate, however, the long-term impact of Freud’s cocaine addiction on the brilliance of his later ideas.
No More Pain with Cocaine
The young Freud championed the use of cocaine not only as a stimulant, but also as a local anesthetic, something else it’s actually quite good at. He passed on his knowledge to the ophthalmologist Karl Koller, who used cocaine as a topical anesthetic during eye surgery to great success, his results published in the British medical journal The Lancet.
A young American doctor named William Stewart Halsted (noted for founding Johns Hopkins Hospital and pioneering the radical mastectomy) read about Koller’s experiments and gave them a try himself, employing cocaine to numb the pain of dental surgery and practicing the technique on his graduate students (we’re sure they thanked him for the privilege).
Naturally, cocaine’s pain-relieving skills led to its enthusiastic embrace by the burgeoning producers of patent medicines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cocaine was a major ingredient in many popular medications, including Roger’s Cocaine Pile Remedy and Lloyd’s Cocaine Toothache Drops. (Consumers were assured that these products did not, in fact, contain any addictive drugs. cough)
Roger’s Cocaine Pile Remedy was intended to shrink large and painful hemorrhoids. The pill, taken as a suppository, was probably somewhat effective because cocaine does have the ability to shrink inflamed tissue.
Lloyd’s Cocaine Toothache Drops—advertised as an “instantaneous cure!”—were likely invented in the wake of Dr. Halsted’s successful experiments with cocaine in dental surgery. At the cost of $0.15 a package, the toothache drops were quite affordable. They were also proudly marketed for use with children.
The terribly tragic outcome of Halsted’s experiments with cocaine was his own addiction. The doctor began injecting cocaine directly into his veins for its stimulative effects, quickly becoming an addict. Eventually, he was sent to Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, where the recognized treatment for drug addiction was injecting the patient with large doses of morphine.
Halsted eventually left the sanatorium a broken man, crippled with addictions to both morphine and cocaine. Not that he let that stop him from practicing medicine.
The sweet innocence of a bygone age.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
There is some evidence to suggest that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while on a six-day cocaine binge; indeed, to some readers, the story read like a metaphor for cocaine addiction itself. (Guess which version of the protagonist symbolizes the addict.) Oscar Wilde wrote of the novella, “The transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of The Lancet.” A JAMA article in 1971 closely examined this allegation, noting that at the time of writing, Stevenson was basically an invalid, confined by his doctor to bedrest and under strict instructions not to even speak for fear of upsetting his “pulmonary hemorrhages.” Yet, despite this, Stevenson wrote the novella in an astonishingly short period of time, wherein he didn’t even stop to eat or sleep for
six days. That fact, combined with the nature of the novella itself, makes for a pretty convincing case that Stevenson was high as a kite on cocaine during its composition.
Bottoms Up: Adventures in Drinkable Cocaine
As cocaine was embraced by the patent medicine community, cocaine-based tonics started popping up everywhere. Take the invitingly named Coca Beef Tonic, which was meant to be a substitute for meat. If you couldn’t afford a nice slice of filet mignon, you could instead cough up a few pennies for a beef-flavored beverage. The tonic made up for the lack of meat in your diet by containing cocaine and 23 percent alcohol. Few things combat hunger as well as getting mind-blowingly drunk and high at the same time.
A far more popular method of cocaine distribution, however, was in wine. Angelo Mariani, a French chemist who read about Mantegazza’s euphoric self-experimentation with coca leaves, decided to toss a few leaves in a good bottle of Bordeaux and see what happened next. The ethanol in the wine extracted the cocaine from the coca leaves, which then dissolved and made for one heady drink. Mariani, pleased with the effect, starting bottling up Bordeaux with coca leaves, called the product Vin Mariani, advertised the concoction as a tonic wine, and sat back to reap a fortune. Because, shockingly, Vin Mariani was a hit. At 10 percent alcohol and 8 percent cocaine extract, how could it be anything else? Vin Mariani was so popular that it made the French chemist into a multimillionaire, perhaps the first major fortune founded on blow.
Cocaine dissolved in alcohol! “Fortifies and Refreshes Body & Brain.”
The drink also attracted a wide range of celebrity endorsements and was partially responsible for a substantial degree of late-nineteenth-century literary output: Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Henrik Ibsen, and Robert Louis Stevenson were all dedicated and enthusiastic drinkers, a fact worth remembering the next time you’re stumbling through overly long late-nineteenth-century classics. Cocaine, remember, makes a user supremely confident in their decisions, and, in the case of a novelist, less inclined to edit.
Queen Victoria was a fan of Vin Mariani, as were Popes Leo XIII and Pius X. Thomas Edison drank the wine because it helped to keep him awake during his all-night experiments with electricity. (The committed genius slept only four hours a night. He really needed this stuff.) And former President Ulysses S. Grant, dying slowly from throat cancer, downed bottle after bottle of Vin Mariani to dull the pain as he completed his memoirs.
Vin Mariani was all the rage. And products that are all the rage tend to attract competitors. Competitors, for example, like John Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, eventually shortened to Coca-Cola. When Coca-Cola was first sold on the market in 1886, we know it contained cocaine. What we don’t know—and what no one alive now knows—is how much. (The authors are inclined to think it contained quite a bit.) The drink was advertised as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage” and was credited with easing menstrual cramps. By 1905, it was found to contain 1/400 th of a grain of cocaine per ounce of syrup. And by 1929, Coca-Cola was officially cocaine free. (The cola part of the name, by the way, comes from another ingredient in the mix: the extract of African kola nuts, which contain caffeine and are chewed in West Africa to produce a mild stimulative effect.)
Drink Your Coke, Participate in History
Today, Coca-Cola still actually contains coca extract, just without the fun part. Although the exact recipe is a closely guarded trade secret, the company does import coca leaves legally from Peru’s National Coca Company. After the cocaine is extracted and sold for pharmaceutical use by eye, ear, nose, and throat specialists as a topical anesthesia, the remaining flavor of the coca leaves is enveloped into the secret recipe.
So, although you can’t legally drink cocaine-laced wine anymore, it’s nice to know that a refreshing glass of ice-cold Coca-Cola—the greatest success story in the history of beverages—still has a hint of coca leaves in its taste. That little touch of history in every can of Coke connects you with a five-thousand-year-old story of humans getting high on cocaine.
10
Alcohol
Of Cavemen, Disemboweled Gladiators, the Black Plague, Drunken Wet-Nurses, and Brandy Injections
For thousands of years, mankind struggled through its existence, just trying to kill enough mammoths to get through the week with maybe a relaxing fire to look forward to on the weekend. Then, on some glorious day lost to the mists of time, a Neolithic caveman accidentally left out an earthen jar with some berry juice in it for a few days. And so alcohol was discovered, and mankind suddenly had a new reason to get up in the morning.
Ever since that auspicious day, alcohol—specifically ethanol—has been a staple in our diet and our medicine cabinet. Early humans, in addition to noticing the pleasing impact of alcohol on the brain, realized that it was an effective antiseptic when applied to wounds and slightly anesthetic when you had to get those wounds stitched back together again.
“Did little Billy get mauled by a saber-toothed tiger again? Let’s grab the berry wine.”
It wasn’t long before humans realized that alcohol was also an excellent solvent, particularly good at extracting active ingredients from herbs. And so the seeds were sown to unite medicine and alcohol throughout history. Here are some of the stops along the way between the Neolithic caveman’s fermented berry juice and today’s after-work glass of wine.
Wine
When humans were still a few millennia away from figuring out distillation, wine was the alcohol of choice for medicinal concoctions. Really, the only choice. So ancient remedies, from Egypt to Greece to Rome, all recommended infusing herbs in wine for a multitude of ailments.
But it was ancient Rome that really perfected the art of winemaking and loudly proclaimed its health benefits. Depression, memory problems, grief? Drink some wine. Bloating, constipation, urinary problems, diarrhea, gout? Drink some more wine. Snakebites? Tapeworms? Let’s get smashed.
One recipe, described by Cato, was for a wine infusion to help with constipation: treat grapevines with a mixture of ashes, manure, and hellebore (a deeply poisonous plant). Can you imagine the sommelier’s description?
“Lightly fruity, with hints of ash, manure, and poison.”
Cato went on to suggest that urinary troubles could be cured by mixing old wine with juniper berries and boiling them in a lead pot. The lead poisoning and saturnine gout were added bonuses.
Galen, briefly responsible for the medical care of gladiators in Pergamon, liberally used wine to disinfect wounds—including soaking the bowels of severely wounded gladiators in wine before placing them back inside their bodies. (One extreme way of getting drunk not yet embraced by American fraternities.)
It wasn’t all just one big Bacchanalia, however, and some Roman writers described the negative impacts of drinking too much wine, which they felt magnified the personality defects of the drinker. Public drunkenness was frowned upon during official functions, such as the Senate, where Mark Antony once was so hungover that he vomited.
Wine’s reputation as a healer followed it out of Rome and into the Dark Ages in Europe, where monasteries kept up the tradition of using wine as medicine. The thirteenth-century friar Roger Bacon wrote that wine could “preserve the stomach, strengthen the natural heat, help digestion, defend the body from corruption, concoct the food till it be turned into very blood.”
Bacon, however, also cautioned against overindulgence in wine:
If it be over-much guzzled, it will on the contrary do a great deal of harm: For it will darken the understanding, ill-affect the brain, render the natural vigor languid, bring forgetfulness, weaken the joints, beget shaking of the limbs and bleareyedness; it will darken and make black the blood of the heart, whence fear, trembling, and many diseases arise.
Sounds like Bacon was no stranger to drunkenness.
Bacchus toasts to your health.
Wine kept its place in the medicinal arsenal all the way up to the twentieth century, where it struggled a bit (Prohibition was rough), but i
t has enjoyed a recent revival in the medical field, where the oft-repeated recommendation of a glass of red wine per day has been suggested to reduce the risk of heart disease.
Roger Bacon at work. Job perk for medieval scientists: cool robes.
Gin
Juniper berries have enjoyed a long association with healing. In ancient Egypt, they were thought to cure jaundice. In ancient Greece, they were prescribed for colic and as a little performance booster before those naked wrestling matches. The berries finally made their way into alcoholic concoctions in ancient Rome, where Dioscorides prescribed juniper berries steeped in wine to help cure chest pains.
In the first century, Pliny the Elder also wrote about the health benefits of infusing alcohol with juniper berries, although in his case he noted that steeping berries in red wine would “act astringently on the bowels.”
The astringency of juniper, however, made it a favorite with physicians, and by the time the Black Plague swept its way through Europe, taking an estimated 100 million lives with it, physicians recommended patients burn juniper incense, rub juniper oil on their bodies, wear plague masks complete with juniper berries stuffed in them, and drink juniper cordials to fumigate their bodies and strengthen their constitutions.
It just so happened that around the same time that the Black Plague reached its height (mid-fourteenth century), Dutch distillers were experimenting with making brandy. Perhaps the desperation of the plague-stricken populace led those distillers to try tossing juniper berries into their concoctions as a potential protection (bonus!) to go with the brandy.
Quickly moving on from brandy, which relied upon grapes (not particularly easy to grow in Holland’s northern climate), the Dutch began experimenting with alcohol distilled from grain, all the while keeping the juniper berries as added ingredients.
