For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 4

  Despite his adversities, Pemberton remained the perfect Southern gentleman, receiving customers with old-fashioned courtesy. Perhaps because his son, Charley, was a difficult child, Pemberton always found time for his sister’s children. “One of my earliest memories,” recalled his niece, “is of the chewing gum Uncle John always had in his pocket, but was forbidden in my home as not lady-like. . . . I enjoyed visits [there], where I received more attention than at home.” Pemberton’s nephew, Lewis Newman, portrayed the busy doctor as an obsessed, secretive inventor with “a laboratory in a back room to which but few were given admittance.” Pemberton would forget mealtimes and work far into the night. Another visitor remembered Pemberton as having “more energy than anybody. His chemical laboratory was a very busy place; he was always getting up something.”

  In addition to his two degrees as a doctor and pharmacist, Pemberton was a lifelong scholar who not only kept up with the current drug journals but read widely in the increasingly international pharmaceutical literature. For years, he labored over a master reference work on drugs. In a December 1886 interview, he showed his work in progress to a reporter, who described it as containing “about 12,000 chemical tests.” Though the inventor died before publishing his book, its existence attests to the breadth of his knowledge, far beyond the accomplishments of the simple country root doctor of the Coca-Cola myth. It is not surprising, then, that in creating new patent medicines, he stopped limiting himself to locally grown plants such as stillingia and globe flowers and began to experiment with more exotic substances. One of these imports, initially hailed as a cure-all—but soon to be assailed as the source of an addictive drug—particularly fascinated Pemberton.

  COCA COMES INTO ITS OWN

  In the late 1870s, Pemberton first read about this miraculous new substance. Chewed by native Peruvians and Bolivians for over two thousand years, coca leaves acted as a stimulant, an aid to digestion, an aphrodisiac, and a life-extender, giving the mountain-dwelling Andeans remarkable endurance during long treks with little food. The Incas had called it their “Divine Plant,” and it was central to every aspect of their political, religious, and commercial life. The cochero was never without his chuspa, or coca pouch.

  Around 1876, Pemberton read an article by Sir Robert Christison, seventy-eight-year-old president of the British Medical Association. Fortified by chewing coca, the elderly doctor reported that he climbed Ben Vorlich, a 3,224-foot mountain, skipped lunch, and “at the bottom I was neither weary, nor hungry, nor thirsty, and felt as if I could easily walk home four miles.” Intrigued, Pemberton began reading everything available on the coca plant. And he was not the only one. By the early 1880s, doctors and pharmacists were reporting on the use of coca and its principal alkaloid, cocaine, as a possible cure for opium and morphine addiction. Cocaine had first been isolated in 1855 by the German Gaedeke, but it was Americans who pursued active experimentation.

  In the cosmopolitan cross-fertilization typical of the time, a young Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud read one of these articles in an 1880 Detroit drug journal and, like Pemberton, was excited by the possibilities. In 1884, Freud first tried cocaine himself. It seemed the perfect antidote to his periodic depressions and lethargy; he also clearly thought it increased his sexual potency, writing to Martha Bernays, his fiancee: “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red . . . and if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl . . . or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”

  Later that year, Freud published Über Coca (About Coca), “a song of praise to this magical substance,” as he wrote to his fiancee. In that same year, 1884, an associate of Freud’s, young Carl Koller, found that cocaine could be successfully used as an anesthetic in eye surgery. This discovery, still used, quickly made Koller famous and revolutionized surgery. It also caught the attention of John Pemberton, who had once performed painful eye surgery without benefit of painkiller.

  By the mid-1880s, one drug journal described a “veritable coca-mania” as a result of the “crusade against the enormously increased use of alcohol and morphine.” It was impossible to open a drug journal without finding numerous articles about new uses for the leaf and its principal alkaloid. In response, manufacturers produced coca tablets, ointments, sprays, hypodermic injections, wines, liqueurs, soft drinks, powders, and even coca-leaf cigarettes and cheroots. Coca-Bola, a popular masticatory that came in plugs similar to chewing tobacco, was extensively advertised in 1885.

  VIN MARIANI: THE DIVINE DRINK

  The coca leaf found its most famed commercial use in a now-forgotten drink called Vin Mariani, invented by Angelo Mariani, an enterprising Corsican who in 1863 began selling the Bordeaux wine with a healthy infusion of coca leaf. Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, first advertised in 1884, was a direct imitation. Because Pemberton then modified his Wine Coca to create Coca-Cola, Vin Mariani is, in effect, the “grandfather” of Coca-Cola.

  Mariani’s coca-laced wine became wildly successful not only throughout Europe but in the United States, where his brother-in-law, Julius Jaros, opened a New York branch. A marketing genius, Mariani specialized in testimonials from an incredible array of notables, including Thomas Edison, Emile Zola, President William McKinley, Queen Victoria, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Russell, Buffalo Bill Cody, and three Popes. Leo XIII went so far as to give Mariani a gold medal bearing Leo’s likeness “in recognition of benefits received from the use of Mariani’s tonic.” The Pope apparently bore out Mariani’s claims that coca extended life, because he died at ninety-three in 1903. According to an 1887 biography of Pope Leo, he took “the simplest food, a little wine and water.” Looking at the Pontiff’s frail body, the author wondered “how the lamp of life is fed,” particularly when his face was “of alabaster whiteness,” his eyes “all-radiant with the fire of piety and fatherly kindness.” In fact, the Pope’s lamp of life was fed by Vin Mariana, and the “all-radiant” eyes may have taken their fire as much from coca as from piety.

  Mariani also collected glowing words from “kings, princes, potentates, the clergy, statesmen, artists, and from a host of people eminent in a high degree” around the globe. Only half in jest, an admirer once told Mariani he had forgotten to solicit a testimonial from God. His two major production laboratories were in Neuilly-sur-Seine in France and New York City, but Mariani had principal distribution centers in London, Strasbourg, Montreal, Brussels, Geneva, Alexandria (Egypt), and Saigon.

  Just how much of a kick did Vin Mariani deliver? Fortunately, we can hazard a good guess, because a chemist studying various wine cocas reported in 1886 that Vin Mariani contained 0.12 grain cocaine per fluid ounce. The dosage on the wine’s label called for a “claret-glass full” before or after every meal (a half glass for children). Assuming the wineglass to hold six fluid ounces, three daily glasses would amount to a full bottle of eighteen ounces, or 2.16 grains of cocaine per day—enough to make someone feel very good indeed.

  Mariani’s most important market outside Europe was the United States, and he took advantage of any opportunity for publicity there. During President Ulysses Grant’s final illness in 1885, his physicians administered Vin Mariani, which soothed the pain of his throat cancer and was credited with extending his life so that he could finish his memoirs. In the midst of Grant’s travail, Angelo Mariani traveled to New York City “at the request of a number of prominent physicians who desired to get from him personally a better understanding of . . . this wonderful medicine.” Mariani subsequently advertised the general’s use of his product before the body was cold in Grant’s Tomb.

  The overwhelming popularity of Vin Mariani naturally spawned imitators, particularly in the intensely competitive American patent medicine market. The drug journals of the 1880s were full of recipes for wine of coca. Most were poor copies containing straight cocaine mixed with cheap wine, resulting in a bitter taste but greater effect. By 1885, Vin Mariani ads warned against over twenty ersatz wines, and Mariani himself groused
about “the many worthless, so-called Coca preparations [that are] nothing more than variable solutions of Cocaine in inferior grades of wines or other liquids, shamefully prepared by unscrupulous or ignorant persons [serving to] bring into discredit a really useful drug.” In 1887, one cynical writer, describing Vin Mariani and its illegitimate spawn, referred to “the famous, expert-indorsed, world-renowned coca wine, made now by everybody and his relatives, from the skilled chemist to the mackerel and sugar handlers.”

  PEMBERTON’S FRENCH WINE COCA: A SUPERIOR IMITATION?

  Pemberton’s French Wine Coca appeared as one of the legion of imitators, though his product was probably superior to most on the market. In a March 1885 interview, it was obvious that Pemberton had read the Mariani testimonials for the “intellectual beverage.” Like Mariani, he espoused his wine’s beneficial effects on the educated, professional upper crust of society. The new disease, neurasthenia, had arrived as a status symbol that afflicted only the most refined, mentally active people. Pemberton not only acknowledged his debt to Mariani, but claimed somehow to have seen his formula.

  “Scientists, scholars, poets, divines, lawyers, physicians, and others devoted to extreme mental exertion, are the most liberal patrons of this great invigorator of the brain,” Pemberton told the reporter, explaining that “Mariani & Co., of Paris, prepare an exceedingly popular Wine of Coca. . . . I have observed very closely the most approved French formula, only deviating therefrom when assured by my own long experimentation and direct information from intelligent South American correspondents that I could improve upon [it].” Modestly, he concluded, “I believe that I am now producing a better preparation than that of Mariani.”

  Pemberton advertised that his wine contained “the medical virtues of the Erythroxylon Coca plant of Peru, South America—the African Cola Nuts—true Damiana, with pure Grape Wine.” These two additional ingredients must have constituted the improvements he felt he had made on Mariani’s drink. The kola nut quickly followed the coca leaf as a new medicinal rage. Grown in West Africa, primarily in Ghana, kola nuts were used by the natives in a manner similar to coca. Chewed for extra energy, identified with local deities, and taken as an aphrodisiac, the nuts had been a major part of the fabric of African life for centuries. Like coca leaves, kola nuts had a potent alkaloid—caffeine—in greater proportions than either tea or coffee.

  By the mid-1880s, long articles on kola nuts were running in all the drug journals, praising the nuts as a hangover cure and stimulant. Many articles explicitly compared kola to coca. “Like Coca, Kola enables its partakers to undergo long fast and fatigue,” read one 1884 article. “Two drugs, so closely related in their physiological properties, cannot fail to command early universal attention.” In its 1883–1884 catalog, Frederick Stearns & Company featured Coca and Cola Nut on the same page in parallel columns, with a common headline running across the top: “For the Brain and Nervous System.”

  The second ingredient was damiana, defined by a vintage Webster’s as “the dried leaf of Turnera diffusa of tropical America, California, and Texas, used as a tonic and aphrodisiac.” An 1885 advertisement for “The Mormon Elder’s Damiana Wafers” leaves little doubt that it was indeed regarded as a sexual stimulant: “The Most Powerful INVIGORANT Ever Produced. Permanently Restores those Weakened by Early Indiscretions. . . . A positive cure for Impotency and Nervous Debility.” Thus, all three ingredients of Pemberton’s tonic were considered aphrodisiacs.

  Pemberton’s ads for his coca wine featured an Americanized, supercharged version of Mariani’s claims. He minimized the artistic, gentle aspects while emphasizing his drink as an aggressive cure for nervous disorders, disturbances of internal plumbing, and impotency. He also appropriated Mariani’s testimonials for his own, asserting that “French Wine Coca is indorsed by over 20,000 of the most learned and scientific medical men in the world.” Enthusiastic and wordy, if not completely grammatical, here is an ad Pemberton ran in 1885:

  Americans are the most nervous people in the world. . . . All who are suffering from any nervous complaints we commend to use that wonderful and delightful remedy, French Wine Coca, infallible in curing all who are afflicted with any nerve trouble, dyspepsia, mental and physical exhaustion, all chronic and wasting diseases, gastric irritability, constipation, sick headache, neuralgia, etc. is quickly cured by the Coca Wine. It has proven the greatest blessing to the human family, Nature’s (God’s) best gift in medicine. To clergymen, lawyers, literary men, merchants, bankers, ladies, and all whose sedentary employment causes nervous prostration, irregularities of the stomach, bowels and kidneys, who require a nerve tonic and a pure, delightful diffusable stimulant, will find Wine Coca invaluable, a sure restorer to health and happiness. Coca is a most wonderful invigorator of the sexual organs and will cure seminal weakness, impotency, etc., when all other remedies fail. To the unfortunate who are addicted to the morphine or opium habit, or the excessive use of alcoholic stimulants, the French Wine Coca has proven a great blessing, and thousands proclaim it the most remarkable invigorator that ever sustained a wasting and sinking system.

  THE MORPHINE ADDICT

  Pemberton had a personal reason for his interest in coca as a cure for morphine addiction: he was probably using French Wine Coca in an attempt to break his own habit. Three people associated with him in the final year of his life stated categorically that Pemberton was an addict. J. C. Mayfield recalled under oath that “Dr. Pemberton was in bad health. We did not know at the time what was the matter with him, but it developed that he was a drug fiend.” Mayfield’s ex-wife wrote that Pemberton was “for years addicted to the morphine habit.” Finally, another partner, A. O. Murphey, said that when he discovered the doctor’s addiction, he found it “distasteful.”

  “Morphinism,” as it was then called, was increasingly prevalent, particularly among physicians and pharmacists. The importation of opium to the U.S. had increased dramatically, from almost 146,000 pounds in 1867 to over 500,000 pounds in 1880. Advertisements purporting to offer cures for the habit appeared frequently in Atlanta papers. Addiction was so common among veterans of the Civil War that it was called “Army disease.” Pemberton may have first resorted to morphine to ease the pain of his own war wounds, continuing its use throughout his periodic illnesses.*

  It may seem odd that Pemberton was able to hide his habit so well, but many addicts did. “Few of those addicted to the drug for years are suspicioned even by their most intimate friends,” wrote one physician in 1890. Opium, he said, allowed the habitue to “engage in his daily business pursuits with renewed energy for the time being. The opium eater’s mind seems clear, his thoughts are well directed, his general appearance is above suspicion.”

  At least temporarily, Pemberton must have felt that he was beating his addiction, because he told a reporter in 1885 that “I am convinced from actual experiments that [coca] is the very best substitute for opium, with a person addicted to the opium habit, that has ever been discovered. It supplies the place of that drug, and the patient who will use it as a means of cure, may deliver himself from the pernicious habit without inconvenience or pain.”

  EARLY WARNING SIGNALS

  Although patent medicine suppliers and physicians were generally euphoric about coca and cocaine, some doctors and publications were already sounding the alarm that cocaine might indeed free addicts from morphine—only to enslave them on the new drug. Freud’s friend Ernst von-Fleischl Marxow, for instance, to whom he introduced cocaine as an antidote to his morphine, died horribly in 1891 after years as a cocaine addict.† A German doctor published a scathing and widely translated attack on cocaine in 1886, calling it “the third scourge of mankind,” and American colleagues soon took up his cause.

  As early as June 1885, Pemberton was defending himself against a short piece published in the Atlanta Constitution, which warned “the new drug cocaine will do almost anything . . . on the other hand, the injudicious use of cocaine will make a man more brutal and depraved than e
ither liquor or morphine. Herein lies a new danger. Before long a remedy will be demanded for the cocaine habit.” Pemberton refused to believe it. Most likely fortified with Wine Coca, in a rambling interview a few days later he dismissed the charges as predictable prejudice against anything new.

  Pemberton granted that cocaine, if misused, could be dangerous, but the same could be said for any effective medicine. “I wish it were in my power to substitute the Coca and compel all who are addicted to the use of opium, morphine, alcohol, tobacco, or other narcotic stimulants to live on the coca plant or any of its true preparations,” he said. “It is perfectly wonderful what coca does.” Explaining that “we [Americans] are a great army of nervous invalids,” he espoused coca as a universal panacea that promoted robust health, prodigious physical and mental activity, and long life.

  Sales of French Wine Coca were encouraging. Exactly a week after that peroration on the wonders of coca, Pemberton took out a large ad in the paper announcing that “888 BOTTLES OF PEMBERTON’S COCA WINE SOLD SATURDAY! IT SELLS AND PROVES A LIVING JOY To all who use it. Read what is said by others about this WONDERFUL TONIC AND INVIGORANT.” The inevitable testimonials followed, one by a doctor in Bremen, Georgia, who cured himself of “Insomnia, Melancholia, Hypochondriasis, and all the other foul fiends that haunted my mind and body.” He had also treated twenty patients successfully with Wine Coca—“all of them bona fide ladies and gentlemen of high reputation.” He asserted that the tonic acted quickly on the “great Ganglionic Centers.”

  PROHIBITION PROBLEMS

  Pemberton’s fortunes were finally on the upswing. Perhaps he would join that band of patent medicine millionaires plying their steam yachts. But just when sales of French Wine Coca were booming, the Reverend Sam Jones and his temperance movement nearly ruined him.