The Coca-Cola Companys marketing genius over the past century has perpetuated an American myth, a horse and buggy Gilded Age saga formulated in a laboratory and shrouded in secrecy equal to that of the National Security Agency. The company would have us believe that a little known folksy pharmacist, Dr. John Stith Pemberton, while poring over his steaming cauldrons, created the mystery syrup in 1886 to which carbonated water was added and presto! The most famous soda fountain drink in the history of the world was born.

In reality John Pemberton, a highly respected Atlanta businessman with an extraordinary gift for medical chemistry, imitated a French coca wine formula originally cooked up by a European chemist. Referring to it as an invigorator of the brain, Pemberton claimed it could cure a variety of ailments from indigestion to nervous disorders and sexual dysfunction. When the city of Atlanta introduced Prohibition in 1886, he substituted sugar syrup for the alcoholic wine and called it Coca-Cola. When Atlantas prohibition ended in 1887, he put the kick back in Coke, calling it French Wine Coca.

With due respect to Dr. Pemberton, a severely wounded Civil War veteran addicted to morphine, whose bones rest in a Columbus, Georgia cemetery, if you dig up a Corsican fellow by the name of Angelo Mariani, you will uncover another chemist whose lifelong interests lay in various mind altering concoctions. Dig deeper and you will discover the truth about Coke, the birth and evolution of which the Coca-Cola Company has given very different sworn testimony.

Although Angelo Mariani came from the mountainous island of Corsica, a dazzling uncut emerald in the Mediterranean, he decided to make Paris his home, and it is there he experimented with different coca leaves, which he imported from South America, green housing thousands of plants for his research.

In the course of many drug-induced mind journeys, Mariani discovered that steeping the very purest of coca leaves in Bordeaux wine disguised the bitterness of the leaf, and produced an elixir he named Vin Mariani. The wine became the most popular tonic of Europes royals and aristocracy for three decades. Even our American President, Ulysses S. Grant imported it. And no wonder since it also contained pure Kola nut caffeine, which enhanced the effects of the cocaine. Hence, Mr. Mariani became a very rich man.

Unfortunately for Pemberton, bad health and bad luck followed him to his grave. Prior to his death in 1888, he had engaged in some fuzzy maneuvering with a renowned entrepreneur who purchased the recipe for about $200. When the United States Eighteenth Amendment went into effect in 1920, national Prohibition nixed the use of alcohol and it was again removed from the formula. But the cocaine remained. In copying Marianis brainchild, John Pemberton had produced the soda fountain beverage that bears no resemblance to what is guzzled by the millions of gallons today.

The original wine ingredients had always been a secret, and so too were those of Coca-Cola. If you ask the company when exactly the cocaine was removed (early in the 20th century), they will tell you it never existed. Where did the name come from? As for phosphoric acid content, I remember my father using Coke to clean his car engines. Youd have to be a Kola nut to believe company hyperbole, or hire multiple lawyers to challenge it and lose. Yet, because of its storybook mystique and widespread presence in the remotest backwaters of the planet, Coca-Cola remains today the most valuable liquid gold on earth.



References:

Atlanta Constitution. "Cocaine Sold Illegally." Nov. 20, 1901.
Atlanta Journal. "A Wonderful Medicine." March 10, 1885.
Freud, Sigmund. The Cocaine Papers. Ed. Robert Byck. (NY: Stonehill Press) 1974.
Grinspoon, L. and J. Bakalar. Cocaine: a Drug and its Social Evolution. (NY Basic) 1976.
Kennedy, Joseph. Coca Exotica. (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson UN Press) 1985.
Pendergrast, Mark. For God, Country and Coca-Cola. (NY: Scribners) 1993.
Who Put the COKE in Coca-Cola? Th. Metzger, 1998

Simplicity-Courage-Humor-Soul

Susan Scharfman

A writer since childhood, Susan Scharfman's working life began with several years at CBS News before entering the Foreign Service of the United States. As a Foreign Service officer she served at embassies and USAID missions within Europe, Asia and Africa, as well as in the agency's Washington, D.C. press office. Now a private citizen and novelist, she is researching her next book, and is a writer/editor.