Cocaine is an alkaloid obtained from coca leaves or synthesized from ecgonine or its derivatives.
The coca plant was used by South American Indians for religions and mystical purposes and as a stimulant both to increase endurance and to alleviate hunger.
The first cocaine users were predominantly physicians and middle class professionals, who tended to begin using cocaine in quasi-therapeutic circumstances.
It may have been observes took the habitual consumption of these soft drinks, which also contained caffeine, as a sign of cocaine addiction.
Around 1890 there were more than a hundred beverages that contained either extracts of the coca plant or pure cocaine. This included Koka-Nola and Celery Kola. One of the most famous of the cocaine containing soft drinks and the one that outlasted the others was Coca-Cola.
The inventor of Coca-Cola John Pemberton created a new patent medicine that was advertised as ‘a valuable brain tonic and cure for all nervous affections – sick headache, neuralgia, hysteria, melancholy etc’.
This patent medicine was later promoted as a soft drink with cocaine as its major ingredient.
Using cocaine in manufacturing may have been more cost-effective since the price of cocaine per soft drink was less than using a fluid extract of cocaine. The ingredient was removed from soft drink in the early 1900s after reports began to appear of drug abuse, health problems, and even deaths related to cocaine.
Cocaine was sometimes combined with other types of alcohol. For example, it was sometimes added to whiskey to give a drink an additional boost.
Cocaine as ingredient in soft drink
