A Brief History Of Cocaine

By Kristy McCaffrey

Indigenous people in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru have long chewed coca leaves for their mildly stimulating effect. A coca-leaf chewing native could suppress his appetite and work more hours at higher altitudes.

When the Spanish came to South America in search of riches, they focused on the gold and silver deposits in Peru and Bolivia, and soon forced the native population to constantly chew the leaves to make the mining operations more profitable. But until a way could be found to transport the leaves to Europe without them deteriorating, the use of coca leaves was restricted to South America.

In the 1800s, Albert Niemann—a German—was able to isolate the active ingredient, and it was he who named it “cocaine.” In 1860, he noted, “its solutions have an alkaline reaction, a bitter taste, promote the flow of saliva and leave a peculiar numbness, followed by a sense of cold when applied to the tongue.”

On a side note, Niemann died the following year after his experiments in developing mustard gas as a war weapon had caused fatal damage to his lungs.

In 1863, a Corsican chemist named Angela Mariani created a mixture of wine and cocaine that he called Vin Mariani. It was sold as a stomach stimulant, pain reliever, appetite suppressant, and anemia treatment. Each ounce of the product contained 6 mg of cocaine. Later, he released Elixir Mariani, which had three times the amount of cocaine.

Mariani collected testimonials from the likes of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Thomas Edison, the Queen of Portugal, the King of Spain, Pope Leo XIII, President William McKinley, and many others. In 1885, President Ulysses S. Grant was reported to be sipping Vin Mariani as he wrote his memoirs while dying from throat cancer.

Many copied Mariani’s wine-cocaine mix, including John Pemberton, a pharmacist in the U.S. He sold a blend he called French Coca Wine until the Ku Klux Klan demanded that alcohol be banned from Atlanta. In 1885, Pemberton was forced to remove the alcohol and replaced it with soda water. He called his new drink Coca-Cola, and he upped the cocaine content from 6 mg to 7.2 mg per ounce.

Just after the turn of the century, the dangers of cocaine were becoming more apparent, and in 1906 both Vin Mariani and Coca-Cola were required to remove it from their drinks.