# From "The Hidden History of Beverages" by Alexander Lukashev

## 10. Coca-Cola: How a Coca-Based Drink Became the Symbol of the Caffeine Era

Part One (history), chapter 10 of 14 · 10 footnotes to 11 sources
Page: https://herbalmind.bar/history/coca-cola-and-the-coca-leaf/

How Coca-Cola went from a coca and kola tonic to a caffeine drink, why it still uses coca leaf, and Bolivia’s fight over the leaf at the UN.

Sections:
- **1886: The Birth of a “Medicine” with Cocaine** — the original formula, how it was advertised, and how much cocaine it held
- **1903: The Quiet Removal of Cocaine** — why and how the cocaine was taken out, and what replaced it
- **After 1903** — cocaine’s prohibition in the United States, and Bolivia’s Coca Colla
- **Peru and Bolivia: The Fight for Cultural Heritage** — Morales at the UN, and Bolivia’s exit from and return to the 1961 convention
- **The Argument, Plainly Stated** — the case for and against a legal international trade in the leaf

Questions this chapter answers:
- Does Coca-Cola still use coca leaf today?
  Short answer: Yes: around a hundred tons a year, mostly Peruvian, arrive at a plant in Maywood, New Jersey; the cocaine goes to medicine and the spent leaf into the syrup.
- How much cocaine was in the original Coca-Cola?
  Short answer: About 8.5 mg a glass, by the historian Mark Pendergrast’s estimate.
- Why was the cocaine removed in 1903, and what replaced it?
  [The answer is in the book](https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723)
- How did Bolivia change its obligations under the UN drug convention?
  [The answer is in the book](https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723)

Short answers only. The full account, with its sources, is in chapter 10 of the book — https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723

Sources:
- Gootenberg, Paul. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
- “Coca Kick in Drinks Spurs Export Fears.” The Washington Times, April 19, 2004. [washingtontimes.com/news/2004/apr/19/20040419-093635-4754r](https://washingtontimes.com/news/2004/apr/19/20040419-093635-4754r). Accessed October 4, 2026.
- Pendergrast, Mark. For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
- Elmore, Bartow J. Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.
- Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, Pub. L. No. 63-223, 38 Stat. 785 (1914).
- “Coca Colla Goes on Sale in Bolivia.” Drug War Chronicle, April 16, 2010.
- United Nations. “Bolivian President Evo Morales Addresses the Commission on Narcotic Drugs,” Vienna, March 11, 2009.
- Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, as amended by the 1972 Protocol.
- United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “Bolivia to Re-accede to UN Drug Convention, While Making Exception on Coca Leaf Chewing.” January 2013.
- Holmstedt, Bo, Jan-Erik Lindgren, Laurent Rivier and Timothy Plowman. “Cocaine in Blood of Coca Chewers.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 1, no. 1 (1979): 69–78. [DOI 10.1016/0378-8741(79)90017-5](https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-8741%2879%2990017-5).
- Gagliano, Joseph A. Coca Prohibition in Peru: The Historical Debates. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994.

Free to read: the opening of this chapter, up to “1903: The Quiet Removal of Cocaine”, is free on https://herbalmind.bar/history/coca-cola-and-the-coca-leaf/ (also in the free Apple Books sample — https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723)

## Chapter 10, free to read

Coca-Cola never stopped using coca leaf. Around a hundred tons of it, mostly Peruvian, arrive every year at a plant in Maywood, New Jersey — the only facility in the United States licensed by the DEA to import and process the leaf, a job it has done for the company for over a century.[^maywood] There the alkaloid is stripped out and sold on to be made into surgical anesthetic for eye and nasal operations; the spent leaf goes into the syrup.

So the arrangement of 1903, when the company took the cocaine out of the drink but not the leaf, still stands: the cocaine goes to medicine, the flavor goes to the world, and the plant that was declared a menace is quietly unloaded at a New Jersey dock year after year.

### 1886: The Birth of a “Medicine” with Cocaine

When pharmacist John Pemberton created Coca-Cola, it was a tonic syrup named for two plants: coca leaf, the source of cocaine, and the kola nut, a source of caffeine. Its first advertisement, in 1886, called it “a valuable Brain Tonic and a cure for all nervous affections — Sick Head-Ache, Neuralgia, Hysteria, Melancholy, etc.” By the historian Mark Pendergrast’s estimate, a glass of the original drink held about 8.5 mg of cocaine — enough for a mild tonic effect.[^pendergrast2000]

[^maywood]: Gootenberg, 2008, 199–201, on the arrangement; the tonnage from “Coca Kick in Drinks Spurs Export Fears,” 2004, quoting the spokesman of Peru’s state coca company.
[^pendergrast2000]: Pendergrast, 2000, 30–31 for the advertisement and 53 for the estimate, made from a formula apparently in the hand of Pemberton’s partner Frank Robinson.

The rest of this chapter continues in the full book.

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These are chapter cards — what each chapter covers, with a few short answers and the book’s free pages — not the chapters themselves.
Apple Books, with a free sample: https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723
Other stores: https://books2read.com/u/mqlAwO