The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [46]
When Europeans started isolating chemical compounds in the very early 1800s, cocaine was one of the last: in 1803 morphine was isolated from opium; quinine and caffeine appeared in 1820; nicotine in 1828. These new plant-derived, active-on-humans substances were all given an “-ine” ending, and when the coca’s most active property was isolated in 1860, it received an “-ine” too. Remember that there were thousands of potions in every country that were sworn by for love and for money, and those are two very powerful motivators. Imagine how you would feel if, say, you paid a fortune for a health elixir and did get better; or you gave a potion to your dying mother, and yet she went on dying. Such experiences can make people adamant in either direction—further invested in the idea that the drug was the right thing, or angry. Until scientists proved that there was a chemical ingredient, and gave it a scientific name, how could you know for certain that a drug was the real thing? When the cocaine craze hit, it borrowed nothing from the lab except this legitimacy. Scientists had isolated the chemical, but this knowledge had little to do with the way the cocaine craze started in Europe and the United States.
Corsican Angelo Mariani was living in Paris when he came up with the idea of soaking coca leaves in wine, and he launched his spiked wine from there in 1863. The alcohol broke down the leaves (which could then be removed) and covered their bitter taste. Mariani is famous in the history of advertising because he sent a case to the pope, got a thank-you note, and published it. He did the same with Thomas Edison, Queen Victoria, President McKinley, Sarah Bernhardt, Émile Zola, and two more popes. Big surprise: they all liked the cocaine wine a lot. Most of them were just wild about it; McKinley wrote to say thanks for the case but that he didn’t need the introduction as he had been drinking Vin Mariani regularly for a while already. Ulysses S. Grant, Jules Verne, Ibsen, Rodin, all three Lumière brothers, and a hundred others all sent in testimonials. H. G. Wells sent in two drawings of himself, one melancholy, labeled “Before Vin Mariani,” and a happy one labeled “After Vin Mariani.” Notice there was not a hint of shame or naughtiness in any of this. It was recommended, after all, by presidents, queens, and popes.
Mariani became rich. So did a few enterprising people who copied his idea. One of those was Atlanta druggist John Smith Pemberton. In his fifties, he had already patented a bunch of inventions. He added the kola nut to Mariani’s formula and created Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. This he marketed as a cure-all, an “intellectual beverage,” and a happiness tonic, and it was soon widely adored. When the temperance movement began to gain strength in the United States, Pemberton realized his cocaine-and-wine beverage had an ingredient with a serious PR problem: the wine! There was no obvious way to convert this into a “temperance drink,” as wine had been practically the whole drink. Pemberton’s nephew tells how Uncle John converted his entire house into a laboratory for Coca-Cola: “an enormous filter made of matched flooring, wide at the top and narrowing to the base…was built through the floor of a second story room and the ceiling of the room below.” In 1887, the dying Pemberton told a friend, “The only thing I have is Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola some day will be a national drink. I want to keep a third interest in it so that my son will always have a living.” That son, Charley, died of a morphine overdose in 1893, at the age of forty. The more drug use there was, the more people died of it. Such stories look like object lessons in hindsight—but most people thought of drugs in a much more open and amorphous way.