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http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/29/coca-cola-and-its-egregious-history/
Plus, my own piece on Coca-Cola and cocaine:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution/Revolution_in_Colombia_part3.htm
Dr. David F. Musto, a psychiatric clinician and medical historian at
Yale University, and author of ''The American Disease,'' points out that
among the most prominent early promoters of cocaine for medicinal
purposes was Sigmund Freud, who used it and prescribed it to try to cure
his friend and colleague Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow of opium addiction.
In his famous essay ''On Coca'' in 1884, Freud wrote that cocaine
''wards off hunger, sleep and fatigue and steels one to intellectual
effort.'' Freud wrote that in dozens of tests on himself, he had
experienced no adverse side effects and that even with repeated doses
cocaine was not habit-forming. In "Why Freud Was Wrong," author and
physician Richard Webster speculates that many of Freud's key
"discoveries" were made when he was loaded on cocaine since they
demonstrate the typical grandiosity of someone who has had one blow too
many.
Other cocaine devotees included Pope Leo XIII, Thomas Edison, Sarah
Bernhardt, Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen and the Prince of Wales, later to
become Edward VII. Cocaine became popular as the methadone of its day: a
supposedly harmless, non-addictive drug that could be substituted to
satisfy the cravings for the opium derivatives such as morphine.
One of the most notable attempts to use cocaine in this way led directly
to the formation of the Coca-Cola company, which to this day uses
non-intoxicating residues of the coca leaf for flavor. John Smith
Pemberton, the Civil War veteran and morphine addict who invented the
drink in Atlanta in 1886, thought that the soft drink was the answer for
old-fashioned American malaise, as well as being a good substitute for
opium addiction, including his own. It was also intended to be a
substitute for alcohol, which was under attack from the temperance
movement. As his home town Atlanta was threatening to soon go dry, he
saw the need for a soft drink which might prove as a substitute for
beer, wine and whiskey. His solution, a fruit-flavored sugar syrup which
combined the caffeine kick of the kola nut and the narcotic buzz of the
coca leaf, was initially designed to be mixed with plain water. Only
when it was diluted with seltzer did it become the monstrously
successful drink that eventually dominated world markets. It can also be
used to remove rust from automobile radiators reputedly.
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