You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [40]
In his book For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, Mark Pendergrast claims there were about 8.45 milligrams of cocaine in each serving, which is about one-quarter of what people put up their nose to get high these days. But fans of the drink were known to chug up to five at a sitting, or to drink the syrup instead of mixing it with water, both practices that would bring the high to right around street level.
So how instrumental was the drug in making Coke the largest brand on earth? By the time they removed its magic ingredient, in the early twentieth century, addicts were ordering the wildly popular beverage by asking for “a dope.”
Before you go trying it . . .
Turns out Pemberton was wrong about cocaine’s ability to cure morphine addiction. According to Pendergrast, the year he died he was so “worried about where money would come from for his morphine” that “John Pemberton sold two-thirds of his Coca-Cola rights . . . for the grand sum of one dollar.” Of course, that’s one dollar in 1888 money. Today, that’d be worth not even one goddamned billionth of what you should leave your family after inventing the most successful product in the history of capitalism!
1. DOCK ELLIS TRIPS HIS WAY TO A NO-HITTER
In the hundreds of thousands of games in Major League Baseball history, there have been only 267 in which the starting pitcher completes a game without giving up a hit. Pedro Martínez, like most pitchers, has gone his entire career without throwing one. In fact, the New York Mets have been sending a pitcher out to the mound 162 times every season for forty-six years, and not a single one has pitched one. Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis did it on June 20, 1970, though he barely remembers being there.
The drug: acid
The day of his no-hitter, Dock Ellis woke up around noon on what he thought was Friday and ate three tabs of acid. When his girlfriend arrived carrying Saturday’s newspaper, Ellis realized that either his girlfriend was a time traveler or he’d slept through Friday. The sports page had more bad news—he was scheduled to pitch in San Diego in six hours. Not only had he woken up on the wrong day, but the city that was just starting to swim around him was Los Angeles.
Unfazed, Ellis hopped a flight to San Diego and faced down a lineup that had woken up knowing what day it was and also had the upper hand in the “not on acid” category.
Not a single one got a hit.
Ellis remembers very little about the game, other than that sometimes the ball looked huge and other times tiny, and that at one point he dove out of the way of a line drive, only to look up and see that the ball hadn’t even reached the mound.
Why it makes sense
Writing in the New Yorker, Oliver Sacks describes a state of mind known among athletes as “the zone” in which, “A baseball . . . approaching at close to a hundred miles per hour . . . may seem to be almost immobile in the air, its very seams strikingly visible . . . in a suddenly enlarged and spacious timescape.” The zone is typically brought on by confidence, adrenaline, and being freaking awesome at baseball. Ellis was all of those things, and LSD’s effects include increased heart rate and the perception that time has slowed. So it’s conceivable that Ellis tripped his way into the zone.
There’s also the mental component. A large part of throwing a no-hitter is getting over the fact that you’re doing it. As the game goes on and the lonely bastard in the middle of
“Time to pitch at baseball! Watch it throw, today! Sports forever!”
the diamond gets closer to immortality, the tension builds in the park and in the pitcher. Trying to throw a no-hitter is so mentally taxing that it’s considered the height of dickery for a teammate to acknowledge it until the final out is recorded.
But baseball history was the last thing on Ellis’s mind that day. He was too busy trying to keep his shit together while a bunch of giant lizards had an orgy in the on-deck circle.
Before you go trying it . . .
Ellis never reached his potential because of drug addiction. Instead of being a household