COCA-COLA. IT REALLY IS THE REAL THING.

So you don’t have to be a pub quiz expert to know that the original recipe for Coca-Cola used to contain coca leaves, which contain cocaine and that they stopped the practice in 1903, but the word remained in the name…..Wrong!

We also know that it is illegal to possess coca leaves in pretty much every country in the world….well…er yeah…

That is, unless you are Coca-Cola!

Coke is still very much “The Real Thing”. Coke still contains Coca leaves.

How is that? I hear you say.

Well, it seems that the Coca-Cola Company have been given exemption from prosecution all over the world.

No way.

Way!

So what you’re saying is that Coca-Cola has still got cocaine in it?

Well, no, there’s no cocaine in Coca-Cola. They take the coke out of the leaves before they go into the drink.

OK, they make billions of gallons of Coca-Cola worldwide, that’s a lot of Charlie they extract from the leaves. Where does all that cocaine go?

That’s sort of the point of this post. Where does it all go?

Well it kind of goes like the drug dealers in the movies:

In the US the big boss (Coke) never touches the product. Coca-Cola has the exemption to make it happen. The leaves go via another company The Stepan company of Northfield, Illinois, who are the processors. The Stepan company is also exempt from government prosecution.

About 100 metric tons of coca leaves are imported to Stepan every year, mostly from Peru. They send the coca leaves to Coca-Cola and the pure cocaine to another company, the Covidien/Mallinckrodt company of Mansfield, Massachusetts. These are the big time drug dealers. Mallinckrodt also grow cannabis in the US for the THC and import opium from India.

So this Covidien company of Massachusetts has got shitloads of cocaine, cannabis and opium.

What do they do with it?

It’s supposed to be for “medicinal use”. I don’t have the figures for the cannabis and opium. Let’s say they take in as much as they need, but Coca-Cola is huge, they have to take everything they are given…right?

OK, get your calculators out. If it takes 300g of leaves to make 1g of cocaine. 100 metric tons of leaves equals 333 kilos of cocaine a year. At £50 a gram that’s £16.7M worth of cocaine each year in the USA alone and that's before they cut it!

So Coca-Cola are responsible for producing £16M worth of pure cocaine in the US alone, never mind about the rest of the world!

Maybe it is for medical use and it’s all innocent?

According to Wikipedia the only medical use for cocaine is it is occasionally used in nose operations as an aesthetic if other solutions don’t work. Humm, 6.66M lines of cocaine for occasional nose operations….nah!

Wherever it goes, both Covidien and Stepan agree that things go better with coke.