ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER

Issue #009  |  Food Lies  |  April 2026

He was a wounded Confederate soldier addicted to morphine. He invented a coca leaf and wine concoction to cure himself. He failed. He died penniless in 1888, still hooked, having sold his recipe for the equivalent of a used bicycle. And every single can of Coca-Cola sold today still contains an extract from coca leaves shipped by the only company in America with a federal licence to import them.

BY THE NUMBERS

On Easter Sunday 1865, Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John Stith Pemberton was defending a bridge in Columbus, Georgia, against Union cavalry under General James Wilson. The American Civil War was almost over. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox five days earlier. The Battle of Columbus is sometimes called the last major battle east of the Mississippi — a fight that, technically, never needed to happen.

In the chaos of the cavalry charge, a Union sabre slashed Pemberton across the chest. The wound was nearly fatal. He survived, but only because of the painkiller that was being handed out to wounded veterans by the bucketload across the South: morphine.

Within weeks, Pemberton was hooked. He was not alone. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of Civil War veterans came home addicted to morphine — so many that the condition was called "the soldier's disease." For Pemberton, the addiction would shape every remaining year of his life. It would kill him. And on the way down, it would accidentally create the most valuable beverage brand on Earth.

Before the war, Pemberton had trained as a pharmacist and chemist in Macon, Georgia. He was good at it. He held a medical degree by the age of 19 and ran a pharmacy in Columbus before enlisting. So when his morphine addiction became unmanageable in the years after the war, he did what a chemist would naturally do. He went into the laboratory to invent a cure.

His early experiments were dangerous and bizarre. One of his first attempts was something called "Dr Tuggle's Compound Syrup of Globe Flower," whose active ingredient came from buttonbush — a plant now known to be toxic to humans. It did not catch on, for obvious reasons.

Then he heard about a new European craze. A French chemist named Angelo Mariani had created a wine infused with coca leaves from Peru. It was called Vin Mariani, and by the 1880s it was the most fashionable medicinal drink in Europe. Pope Leo XIII drank it. Queen Victoria drank it. Thomas Edison said it helped him work through the night. The Pope even gave Mariani a Vatican gold medal and allowed his image to be used in advertising.

Pemberton looked at Vin Mariani and saw two things at once. He saw a possible cure for his own morphine addiction. And he saw a fortune.

In 1885, Pemberton released his own version of the European drink. He called it Pemberton's French Wine Coca. He took the basic Vin Mariani formula — wine plus coca leaves — and added two ingredients of his own: kola nut from West Africa, which contained caffeine, and damiana, a Central American shrub leaf with a reputation as an aphrodisiac.

The drink was advertised as a cure for almost everything. Headaches. Nervous exhaustion. Depression. Impotence. Alcoholism. And — the marketing claim that mattered most to Pemberton personally — morphine addiction.

It sold extraordinarily well in Atlanta. For a brief moment, Pemberton looked like he was about to become rich and free of the drug that was destroying him.

Then, in 1886, the city of Atlanta voted in alcohol prohibition. Pemberton's main product was now illegal. He had months — maybe weeks — to reformulate it as a non-alcoholic beverage or watch his business collapse.

Pemberton went back to his lab and stripped out the wine. He kept the coca leaves. He kept the kola nut. He added sugar syrup, citric acid, and a blend of essential oils. He mixed the result with carbonated water at the suggestion of a pharmacy clerk who happened to have a soda fountain handy.

On May 8, 1886, the first glass of the new drink was sold at Jacob's Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta. Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, came up with the name — using the two main ingredients, with the second "K" softened to a "C" for the alliteration — and hand-drew the now-famous flowing logo that has barely changed in the 140 years since.

The drink was Coca-Cola.

Each glass sold for five cents. In its first year, it averaged about nine drinks per day. Pemberton — sick, broke, still addicted to morphine, and convinced his invention would never amount to much — began selling off pieces of the formula to anyone who would buy them.

By 1888, Pemberton's morphine addiction had become catastrophically expensive. His health was collapsing. He was dying of stomach cancer, although the morphine probably masked most of the symptoms. He needed cash.

In a series of desperate transactions, Pemberton sold off the rights to Coca-Cola in pieces. The final remaining share went to a fellow Atlanta pharmacist named Asa Griggs Candler for around $300 — the equivalent of roughly $10,000 in today's money. The price of a used car. For one of the most valuable trademarks ever created.

Pemberton died in August 1888 at the age of 57, poor and still addicted. His son Charles, who briefly inherited a stake in the formula, also became addicted to morphine and was found dead with opium beside him just six years later. The Pemberton family was wiped out by the same drug that had inspired Coca-Cola in the first place.

Asa Candler, on the other hand, became one of the richest men in the South. Within a decade he had bought out every other partner and consolidated full control of the formula. By the time he sold the company in 1919, it was worth $25 million.

This is where the story gets murky, because Coca-Cola has spent more than a century insisting that the original formula contained only "trace" amounts of cocaine. Historians who have actually analysed surviving 19th-century recipes are less polite. The most commonly cited figure is around 9 milligrams of cocaine per glass — about one and a half times what was in Vin Mariani, and roughly equivalent to a single small line of street cocaine today.

That was the original product the public was drinking. A child could walk into Jacob's Pharmacy in 1886, hand over five cents, and walk out having ingested a measurable dose of cocaine. It was sold openly. It was marketed to women, to children, to the elderly, and to anyone suffering from "nervous exhaustion."

By the late 1890s, public attitudes were starting to shift. Cocaine was being linked to crime, addiction, and unrest, especially in the American South where the drug was being unfairly blamed for racial violence. The pressure on Coca-Cola grew. In 1903, the company finally removed the active cocaine from the formula.

Here is the part of the story almost nobody knows. To this day — in 2026, 140 years after Pemberton's first batch — Coca-Cola still uses an extract made from real coca leaves. And those leaves are still legally imported into the United States by a single company that holds the only federal licence to do so.

The company is called Stepan, and its plant is in Maywood, New Jersey. Stepan has held this licence for decades. It is the only commercial entity in America with permission from the Drug Enforcement Administration to import bulk shipments of coca leaves from Peru and Bolivia. The New York Times reported in 1988 that Stepan was bringing in between 56 and 588 metric tons of coca leaves per year. The exact current figure is classified.

At the Maywood plant, Stepan does two things with the leaves. First, it extracts the cocaine alkaloid and sells it to pharmaceutical companies for legitimate medical use — primarily as a topical anaesthetic for ear, nose, and throat surgery. Second, it processes the leftover leaf material into a flavour extract that contains no cocaine but retains the unique aromatic compounds. That extract is sold to one customer, and one customer only.

The arrangement is so unusual that some legal scholars refer to the regulatory framework around it as the "Coca-Cola laws." Coca leaf is a Schedule II controlled substance in the United States. For the average American, possessing even a single dried coca leaf is a federal crime. There are no personal exemptions for coca tea, no exemptions for traditional Andean uses, no exemptions for herbal remedies. But one company in New Jersey is allowed to import hundreds of tons of it every year so that one beverage company in Atlanta can keep making the drink that started as a Confederate soldier's morphine cure.

The standard version of the Coca-Cola story is a tidy American myth. A clever pharmacist invented a tasty drink. A businessman bought it cheap. The brand grew into a global icon. Everyone lived happily ever after.

The real story is darker and stranger. A wounded soldier addicted to morphine tried to invent a cure and failed. The drink that came out of his lab contained a measurable dose of cocaine and was marketed to children. Pemberton himself died penniless and addicted. His son died the same way. The formula was sold for the price of a used bicycle. And the legal apparatus required to keep making the modern, "clean" version of the drink involves a federal narcotics licence, a New Jersey chemical plant, and hundreds of tons of imported coca leaves every year.

None of this is conspiracy theory. Coca-Cola has never denied any of it. The Stepan arrangement is publicly documented. The original 1886 formula has been analysed by historians. The story is just one that nobody at the company has any incentive to tell — and one that most consumers have no idea exists.

A sabre wound at the last battle of the Civil War. A morphine addiction that never broke. A failed cure that became a global empire. A $300 deathbed sale. A New Jersey factory still importing the same coca leaves a Confederate veteran first stirred into a glass in 1886.

Every can of Coke is, in a small but literal sense, still a 19th-century chemist's morphine cure. It just stopped working a long time ago.

SOURCES

Pendergrast, Mark — For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes It (Basic Books, 2013)

Wikipedia — John Stith Pemberton (verified against multiple primary sources)

Encyclopedia.com — "Pemberton, John Stith" biographical entry

Pharmacy Times — "5 Facts About Famous Pharmacist John Pemberton, Coca-Cola Inventor"

The New York Times — 1988 report on Stepan Company DEA licence and coca leaf imports

DEA / Federal Register — Importer registrations for coca leaf, Schedule II controlled substances

Stepan Company — public corporate filings, Maywood, NJ facility documentation

21 CFR § 182 — Substances Generally Recognized as Safe (decocainized coca leaf extract)