Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX6d88VD7lw
the jurogan experience this was the beginning of this book because i was doing that i was looking at all the ingredients that go into coca-cola and saying okay where what's in the drink first of all because it's from my hometown that's where it started i said okay i want to find out all these natural resources in the product and you know is cocoa in the drink and also caffeine we'll get to that that's how it gets to monsanto but um cocoa was the most interesting actually because i thought you know it's called coca-cola so does it have cocaine in it um and so i went back to look at that and turns out yeah you know trace amounts back still in the beginning no no in the beginning yeah but this is what's interesting about the history of the drink so this is 1886 back then the coca leaf was actually seen as something that was medicinal medicinal innocuous absolutely and everyone was using the coca leaf i mean there was a drink called vin mariani it was actually a wine a red wine that was mixed with coca leaves wow so it kind of had a little kick to it and like queen victoria of england drank this stuff ulysses says grant our president was like woo you know coke of wine this is awesome and uh even the pope actually and i i wonder if communion would have had you know vin mariani we would all be catholic or something but um but so it was really popular and this guy this guy was down on his luck john pemberton who started coca-cola in atlanta he wanted to make a coca drink himself and so he made this originally coke was actually a wine it was like a wine of cocoa it was a red wine mixed with cocoa leaves exact knockoff of that drink that was really popular and um and then prohibition hits atlanta because we're in the protestant south in the 1880s and so he has to take out the alcohol and so he creates this non-alcoholic drink coca-cola that has the coca leaf in it they weren't concerned about the coca they
were concerned about alcohol uh and it remained in the drink uh throughout the 20th century what kind of dose would it have in it very small you know and this i think is important you know people equate the coca leaf with you know cocaine because yes you can make cocaine like street cocaine from you know processing all these coca leaves but if you go to peru today or you go to certain parts of south america people chew coca leaves it's a normal practice it's been going back thousands of years to the inca even um and so it's very small amounts we're not talking about like in fact you'd probably get a bigger hit from like you know experience from a cup of espresso from starbucks but interestingly the reason that cocaine became taboo and why it got pulled from the drink had nothing to do with national laws in the country which was so interesting when i was studying it it had everything to do with racism actually in the south because there was a concern that cocaine was contributing to black crime in atlanta which was being of course blown up by segregationists and white supremacists and asa candler who was white guy in atlanta didn't want to have anything to do with that so he decides kind of quietly to take out the cocaine but here's the interesting interesting thing joe they kept the coca leaf as one of their secret ingredients yeah it it's so secret ingredient number five by the way cook doesn't like talking about this this is not part of their history that they like discussing um but it's clear as day in the archives you can see it so it's called merchandise number five the fifth secret ingredient in coca-cola and i like the name isn't it merchandise number five well the whole idea is that you name things so that no one asks questions right what's merchandise number five also that that ingredient includes a little bit of the cola nut um which is from uh west africa actually and it was originally in there because it has caffeine another kind of caffeine kick um that's where coca-cola comes
from but cola by the way is with a k the actual color nut anyway that's merchandise number five and it's basically the flavor of the coca leaf um the essence of the coca leaf and the way it works is these leaves are brought in from peru is actually where coca-cola sourced it that was crazy i had to track down okay where are they getting their cocoa leaves from and there's this company called maywood chemical company today the company is called steppen chemical company is that new jersey it is in new jersey exactly with new jersey yeah they're no they're the ones who process it and they make medical grade cocaine out of it and then use the flavor aspect of it for coca-cola exactly and you know technically at first as you as you put it most of the cocaine was going for pharmaceutical uses and for you know lidocaine all sorts of things like that they use for legitimate purposes but coke needed actually so much flavoring think about their brand it's so big like wheat grass juice you squeeze a lot to get exactly the cup so they had to like come up with this special i love it you can't make this stuff up this is why history is fun there's a special exemption in our laws for what are called special leaves from peru and if anybody looking at it saying well what the hell are these special leaves you know and they're special because they're allowed to come into the united states exclusively basically to create the flavoring extract for coca-cola a lot of people call it the coca-cola joker how closely do you think they monitor that supply you know i mean very closely they even have to yeah if a bundle or two fell off a truck here or there that could be extremely profitable right i talked to somebody once they said so is there like a pile of cocaine somewhere up in new jersey you know where this is happening and uh you know i don't think that's the case but here's here's the crazy part too this is what's fun about tracing these stories of ingredients because they lead you to places you never thought you'd go like this book which we'll talk about but um it got weird if that's not weird it got
weirder in the 60s because coca-cola wanted to figure out a way to make coca leaves in the united states to grow their own coca leaves they weren't satisfied with this trade with peru and these are declassified dea documents at the national archives this is not like you know yeah something crazy you can see it and actually it's in the book but basically they petition the federal government to start growing it at first they're thinking like the virgin islands but then they're like i don't know there's like all these tourists it's gonna be crazy but they have to find a climate and a location geography where they can do this and they ultimately go okay what about hawaii and they do joe they grew coca leaves secretly a totally secret operation called the alakaya project also called alike what does that mean exactly nobody's gonna ask questions you know obfuscate the the story in kauai oh wow and it was done through the university of hawaii they had to sign all these non-disclosure agreements and they wouldn't publish their papers uh you know on the study of all this the reason the government agreed to it is that coke said we're going to create a cocaine-less coca shrub like basically breed a plant that doesn't have cocaine in it and of course that never really transpires but they do end up growing secretly behind barbed wire fences coca leaves for coca-cola uh in the 60s but i'm an environmental historian so i study the relationship between like businesses and the environment and in this case the environment matters because nature bit back so in the 60s this fungus that's native to hawaii was like whoa this plant uh that's not native and attacks it and it wipes out the entire cocoa crop of coca-cola so that the
supply they had for a very brief time in the 60s is wiped out they go back to sourcing it from peru watch the entire episode for free only on spotify