Workers at the Coca-Cola factory found a huge stash of the cocaine inside a shipment of fruit juice in southern France.
French officials say the cocaine was
discovered in backpacks among a shipment of orange juice concentrate that originated in Costa Rica. The 370 kg of literal coke
uncovered at the factory is reported to have a
potential street value of €50 million Euros
($55m) and was referred to as a “very bad
surprise” by a local prosecutor.
Authorities are currently unaware of who was
behind the cocaine, but an investigation is
now underway in Signes, a village in the south
of France. Employees of the plant have
already been ruled out as suspects.
“The first elements of the investigation have
shown that employees are in no way
involved,” according to Jean-Denis Malgras,
the regional president of Coca-Cola.
“You can well imagine the surprise,” said
another spokesman for Coca-Cola.
When the staff unearthed the haul when they
opened a delivery of fruit juice concentrate
from Costa Rica last Friday, they immediately
alerted police and were ruled out as potential
suspects.
An investigation into trafficking and importing
of illegal drugs has been launched by the
Marseille prosecutor’s office.
The factory, situated in the town of Signes,
near the Mediterranean, produces
concentrates for various drinks.
Coca-Cola was originally called Pemberton’s
French Wine Coca and contained a mixture of
Peruvian coca leaves, kola nut, damiana, and
cocaethylene (cocaine mixed with alcohol).
Druggist John Stith Pemberton invented his
French Wine Coca in Atlanta, Georgia, and it
became very popular across the southeastern
United States.
The Coca-Cola recipe was a closely guarded
secret, but in 1891, an Atlanta newspaper
reported what many had already suspected:
Coca-Cola contained cocaine . Coke was
forced to change its marketing strategy and
began referring to their product as
“refreshing,” rather than promoting any
medicinal benefits. Coca-Cola began taking
cocaine out of its soft drink in 1903 because
of racially-promoted fears among white
society.
When cocaine and alcohol meet inside a
person, they create a third unique drug
called cocaethylene. Cocaethylene works
like cocaine, but with more euphoria.
So in 1863,
when
Parisian
chemist
Angelo
Mariani
combined
coca and
wine and
started
selling it, a butterfly did flap its wings.
His Vin Marian became extremely
popular. Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas,
and Arthur Conan Doyle were among
literary figures said to have used it, and
the chief rabbi of France said , "Praise be
to Mariani's wine!"
Pope Leo XIII reportedly carried a flask
of it regularly and gave Mariani a
medal.
Seeing this commercial success, Dr. John
Stith Pemberton in Atlanta -- himself
a morphine addict following an injury
in the Civil War -- set out to make his
own version. He called it Pemberton's
French Wine Coca and marketed it as a
panacea. Among many fantastic claims,
he called it " a most wonderful
invigorator of sexual organs ."
But as
Pemberton's
business started
to take off, a
prohibition was
passed in his
county in
Georgia (a local
one that
predated the
18th
Amendment by
34 years). Soon French Wine Coca was
illegal -- because of the alcohol, not the
cocaine.
Pemberton remained a step ahead,
though. He replaced the wine in the
formula with (healthier?) sugar syrup.
His new product debuted in 1886: "Coca-
Cola: The temperance drink."
After that, as Grace Elizabeth Hale
recounted recently in the The New York
Times , Coca-Cola "quickly caught on as
an 'intellectual beverage' among well-off
whites." But when the company started
selling it in bottles in 1899, minorities
who couldn't get into the segregated
soda fountains suddenly had access to
it.
Hale explains:
Anyone with a nickel, black
or white, could now drink
the cocaine-infused
beverage. Middle-class
whites worried that soft
drinks were contributing to
what they saw as exploding
cocaine use among African-
Americans. Southern
newspapers reported that
"negro cocaine fiends" were
raping white women, the
police powerless to stop
them. By 1903, [then-
manager of Coca-Cola Asa
Griggs] Candler had bowed
to white fears (and a wave
of anti-narcotics legislation),
removing the cocaine and
adding more sugar and
caffeine.
Hale's account of the role of racism and
social injustice in Coca-Cola's removal of
coca is corroborated by the attitudes that
the shaped subsequent U.S. cocaine
regulation movement. Cocaine wasn't
even illegal until 1914 -- 11 years after
Coca-Cola's change -- but a massive
surge in cocaine use was at its peak at
the turn of the century. Recreational use
increased five-fold in a period of less
than two decades. During that time,
racially oriented arguments about rape
and other violence, and social
effects more so than physical health
concerns, came to shape the discussion.
The same hypersexuality that was touted
as a selling point during the short-lived
glory days of Vin Mariani was now a
crux of cocaine's bigoted
indictment. U.S. State Department
official Dr. Hamilton Wright said in
1910 , "The use of cocaine by the negroes
of the South is one of the most elusive
and troublesome questions which
confront the enforcement of the law ...
often the direct incentive to the crime of
rape by the negroes." Dr. Edward
Williams described in the Medical
Standard in 1914, "The negro who has
become a cocaine-doper is a constant
menace to his community. His whole
nature is changed for the worse ... timid
negroes develop a degree of 'Dutch
courage' which is sometimes almost
incredible."
Yes, even the Dutch were not spared
from the racism.
The Coca-Cola we know today still
contains coca -- but the ecgonine
alkaloid is removed from it. Perfecting
that extraction took until 1929, so before
that there were still trace amounts of
coca's psychoactive elements in Coca-
Cola. As Dominic
Streatfield describes in Cocaine: An
Unauthorized Biography , the extraction
is now done at a New Jersey chemical
processing facility by a company called
Stepan. In 2003, Stepan imported
175,000 kilograms of coca for Coca-Cola.
That's enough to make more than $200
million worth of cocaine. They refer to
the coca leaf extract simply as
"Merchandise No. 5."
The facility is guarded.
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