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Who Took the Cocaine Out of Coca-Cola?
The medical profession saw nothing wrong with offering a cocaine-laced cola to white, middle-class consumers. Selling it to Black Americans was another matter.
Like many other medical professionals of his time, he identified cocaine as a safe solution to conditions including the “ nervousness ” that plagued the white middle class—not to mention impotence and sexual dysfunction. After Atlanta passed a temperance law the next year, he switched gears and started producing a soft drink named for its two key medicinal ingredients— coca leaf and the caffeine-containing African kola nut. Around the time Candler assumed control of Coca-Cola, Black laborers in the New Orleans area began using cocaine to help them get through long, hard days of physical work.
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