Why We Took Cocaine Out of Soda

Relatedly, the KKK supported women's right to vote, but they did so mostly because the women were more likely to vote for prohibition, and prohibition gave them a chance to put the Catholic-Irish immigrants on the wrong side of the law.

Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South is also useful in tracing behavior and codified practice.

Also worth seeing this http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/ - in addition to lots of great observations on the state of the war on drugs, it makes a persuasive argument that heroin was made illegal because Chinese workers were threatening to undercut white workers in LA.

Do note that cocaine was banned all around the world at the same time. The <a href = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Opium_Convention&... Opium Convention</a> in Hague in 1912 was the first drug control treaty which lead to anti-drug laws in many Western countries. There were many more conventions following that one that caused outlawing of many more narcotic substances. Even if Americans were very racist at the time, maybe they were at the same time sane enough to realize that putting cocaine in soft drinks wasn't a good idea?

> for use in medicine.

Ear-nose-throat guys still use it for contact anesthetic. I had a light shoved up my nose and then back into the throat while they examined the result of a punch to the throat. (Martial arts FTW.) I sat there amazed that I didn't really give a damn with a giant flextube ramming into my face.

> for use in medicine

The compound is cocaine hydrochloride.

Because of this legal medicinal use, cocaine is actually a Schedule II drug in the US. Marijuana is Schedule I. Weed is actually more illegal than cocaine.

It actually refers to English soldiers fighting in the Dutch republic and drinking Dutch Gin before the battle. Time-frame: 17th century.

Just because certain expressions might still be used today and might not be on the fore-front of racism awareness does not make them any less racist.

But you are right, the article had it wrong:

> Originally the phrase 'Dutch courage' referred to the courage that results from indulgence in Dutch gin (jenever), but 'Dutch courage' can also refer to the gin itself. [...] Because of the effects of Dutch gin English soldiers fighting in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century apparently called the drink "Dutch Courage".

So it never actually referred to the people.

> "racism" ... isn't really correct. Dutch courage has been an expression for alcohol-induced courage for centuries.

Right, it is centuries-old racism.

Only 3 centuries though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Dutch_Wars

That was the joke.

There was a war between England and the Netherlands centuries ago that resulted in terms like "Dutch treat," "Dutch uncle," "Dutch courage," and so on. A personal website based in the Netherlands

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~sjoerd/dutch.html

helpfully collects many of those terms, but it seems that the author of the website hasn't read the same book about word and phrase origins I read many years ago (I'm sorry I don't remember which specific book it was, as I read many books on that topic) that explains that those terms entered the English language, along with many others that are now obsolete, during the war. I have a lot of Dutch friends (Dutch nationals in the United States on work-related visas) because of my children's involvement in soccer. The long-ago war between England and the Netherlands is now, er, water over the dam, and indeed one of my Dutch friends has an English wife. So the origin of these expressions is largely forgotten, but, yes, the phrases originated in a wartime contempt for Dutch people among the English.

"Can we say that the social ill-effects are completely imaginary just because at the time concern was focused on blacks?"

Cocaine isn't any worse than caffeine, which is to say that it's not bad at all. It's actually better in many ways, e.g. it's much less harmful to unborn children. As far as I know there aren't any health or social harms from cocaine, at least at the dosage and ingestion method we're talking about here.

If a story lead us to better understand the world then it doesn't necessarily have to come with a neat morals. I'm sure that there were social ill-effects from old-style Coca-Cola, but the people who had experience with both it and liquor being available judged that alcohol was the more dangerous. But it looks like crack is a much more dangerous form of cocaine, so maybe we ought to keep that banned? Maybe an ideal drug control regime, by some metric, would be to allow beer and wine and old-style Coca-Cola but ban gin and crack? I won't claim to know, but debates on this ought to be based on historical evidence as much as possible.

"all arguments against putting cocaine in soda"

What other arguments have been given? Alcohol is the only major drug to have been re-legalized after being banned in America.

"Can we say that the social ill-effects are completely imaginary"

What social ill-effects can you cite in the case of cocaine-infused soda?

"The article seems to be suggesting this, but stops short of saying "let's start drinking cocaine again". Is the journalist ultimately unconvinced by his own arguments?"

It is politically incorrect to argue against the war on drugs, regardless of the damage it has caused to society (much greater than any damage the drugs themselves cause). We are trained from an early age to assume that drugs are bad, and to assume without question that drugs should be illegal (naturally, "medicine" is in a different category). It makes no difference whether or not the war on drugs has been productive, effective at solving any constructive goal, or in any way beneficial when everyone is fed DARE-style propaganda from age 5.

The reality is that in today's world, we should be more afraid of the DEA than of the drugs they "regulate," since their form of "regulation" involves assault rifles, grenades, and tanks (yes, really, surplus military vehicles including tanks and helicopters are routinely transferred to law enforcement agencies). The DEA, like the FBI, has amassed so much signals intelligence power that they are considered to be part of the US intelligence community. The DEA can and does recycle the proceeds from seized property into its own budget -- a practice that was authorized in the 1980s. The DEA can declare drugs to be illegal, without congressional action, for a year -- and prosecute people for possessing or distributing those drugs. The DEA can override congressional recommendations on drug regulation, as they infamously did with MDMA (ecstasy).

Meanwhile, with only two major exceptions, we are getting no tax revenue from recreational drug sales, there is no regulation on the purity or safety of recreational drugs, doctors have no idea what drugs their patients actually ingested, there is no age limit that drug merchants respect (high schoolers can buy cocaine just as easily as working adults), and criminals have access to a massive, steady, and enormous market. There is no time that would be "too soon" to end the war on drugs, develop useful regulations on recreational drugs, and restore our democracy.

American gun politics underwent a weird switcheroo at some point between the 1970's and 1990's. You'd think that as a constitutionally guaranteed civil right, owning guns would be a civil liberties issue championed by the left, but for some reason it isn't today. Yet as you point out, it used to be the far-left Black Panthers who championed the right to keep and bear arms the most, and for exactly the same radical reasons that libertarian gun nuts today talk about.

I love the link you posted. This is my favorite part--no doubt it required immense courage then, but it would be absolutely insane today to do what Huey Newton did:

---

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

You'll have an aneurysm when you read about how heroin used to be sold in pharmacies. The drug war is a very recent phenomenon with a lot of dirty politics driving it.

What is more interesting are the arguments made for making cocaine, heroin, and marijuana illegal. Those are worth a Google search and many hours of reading (by today's standards, the arguments are shocking).

Racism has permeated the war on drugs since its inception: cocaine turned black men into monsters, heroin was made illegal to punish Germans and Filipinos (I still scratch my head about that one), marijuana was said to fuel black Jazz and drive white women into the beds of black men, etc. Even today there is racism evident in the drug war: black men are arrested on drug offenses at a rate of 1-in-4 in some communities (yes, a quarter of the men in some American black communities are incarcerated or have been incarcerated).

"You see enough coders twitching for a Red Bull fix, so who knows what we'd be like with the good stuff."

Twitching is hardly the issue; I would be more concerned about psychosis, which can happen with any stimulant. There are stories of coders who use too much caffeine and wind up in a psych ward. Low, therapeutic doses of stimulants can potentially help people get through difficult mental tasks; continued uses of high doses is risky to physical and mental health. Cocaine is not some kind of exceptional drug in that regard -- you see that pattern with amphetamines, caffeine, cathinones, etc.

wait a sec. The article totally leaps to that conclusion without evidence. It presents two facts - There were strong racist elements to the anti-cocaine movement, and that Coke removed cocaine. But you can't show from those two facts that Coke removed the cocaine for racist reasons. Maybe the removal was racist, but there wasn't any evidence of it in that article. And there was regulation happening at the same time which is even pointed out in the quotation he includes from the NY Times.

Cocaine can indeed be ingested with some notable effects - in parts of South America, they drink coca tea with effects similar to caffeinated tea. In fact, there's evidence to suggest that cocaine is safer as as stimulant than caffeine is - the main difference as we perceive it is the means of ingestion (we're used to thinking of caffeine as something you drink - very few people snort caffeine pills, which is very dangerous).

Also, chewing on cocaine leaves is used as a symptomatic treatment for altitude sickness in South America.

As for the actual bioavailability, take a look at this Bluelight thread: http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/394593-Bioavailability-of...

"Does anyone know what the actual physiological effects of cocaine delivered in a syrupy soda are?"

Exactly the same as caffeine, except for probably less likely to cause developmental problems if consumed by pregnant women.

> It is a bit slimy on the author's part to conflate the racism of the anti-cocaine movement with Coke's removal of cocaine without some substantiation.

Not really. It's a plausible claim and roughly the best that can be done without actual documents or a time traveling mind reader.

So how exactly do you define "race"?

But cocaine is extracted from coca leaves. Even a trivial amount in soda would be a problem in the USA.

Wikipedia: " . . . the alkaloid content of coca leaves is low: between .25% and .77%, and production of cocaine from coca requires complex chemical processes.[2] This means that chewing the leaves or drinking coca tea does not produce the high people experience with cocaine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca

What do you mean? Coca is most certainly the plant that contains cocaine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca

The process for producing pure cocaine(the powdery stuff) is really just an elaborate extraction process. I think it's fair to say that coca-cola originally contained cocaine prior to the invention of the process to remove the alkaloid.

Hate to break it to you, but the tea you drank in Peru was infused with cocaine. Not terribly much cocaine -- a coca leaf doesn't have a high concentration of the drug -- but cocaine nonetheless. Cocaine has been used in South America for centuries; it was not until the 19th century that anyone realized you could concentrate and extract the drug, and use a hypodermic needle to get a rapid and extreme effect (this is how Freud used cocaine, as well as the character Sherlock Holmes).

It is an article in the Atlantic, which uses Reddit reposts as it's primary source of research and was banned from Reddit for spamming. HN upvoters haven't noticed that Atlantic jumped the shark and has been coasting on its brand name for a couple of years now.