The most widely consumed beverage on Earth outside of water and tea originally contained cocaine — formulated in 1886 by an American Civil War veteran named John Pemberton as a patent medicine to cure his own morphine addiction, because Pemberton genuinely believed he was selling a medical tonic, not the soft drink it eventually became

The most widely consumed beverage on Earth outside of water and tea originally contained cocaine — formulated in 1886 by an American Civil War veteran named John Pemberton as a patent medicine to cure his own morphine addiction, because Pemberton genuinely believed he was selling a medical tonic, not the soft drink it eventually became

The 1886 American pharmaceutical landscape into which Coca-Cola was introduced bore essentially no resemblance to the regulated drug-approval system that has governed American medicine since the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration in subsequent decades. The patent medicine industry of the late 19th century operated, by modern standards, in a legal vacuum. There were no requireme…