I assume you actually cannot beat the actual one.
Coca-Cola owes its iconic flavor partly to a chemical processing factory in sleepy New Jersey that holds the one license within the country to import the plant used to make cocaine.
The Maywood plant, now run by Stepan Company, has been processing coca leaves for the soft drinks giant for greater than a century, and its import license was renewed by the Drug Enforcement Agency earlier this yr.
The coca leaves are used to create the “dedicated” soda ingredient, and the remaining by-product is sold to the opioid company Mallinckrodt, which uses the powder to make an anesthetic for dentists, DailyMail reported.
Nevertheless, it isn’t clear how much coca leaves Stepan’s imports annually The New York Times reported in 1988 that it imported between 56 and 588 metric tons of coca leaves from Peru and Bolivia annually, citing DEA figures.
One ton of coca leaves costs over $5,500 in Peru, so Stepan would pay between $308,000 and $3.2 million to ship the illegal leaves if the quantity it imported remained constant for many years. according to data from the agricultural company Selina Wamucia.
Ricardo Cortés, creator of the 2012 book The Secret History of Coffee, Coca and Cola, wrote that he had obtained data from the National Company of the Coca, a Peruvian state-owned company, showing that up to 104 tons of coca leaves were exported to Maywood annually in 2007-2010.
The importation of coca leaves was banned in 1921, but laws left an exemption for Maywood Chemical Works, which operated the plant before the Stepan Company purchased the location in 1959.
Meanwhile, the legal waiver that the factory received helped the Coca-Cola brand develop into a globally recognized company now valued at roughly $265 billion.
“Coca-Cola’s success because the mega-company it’s today is at the very least partly due to special privileges granted by the federal government during World War II and the suppression of potential competitors within the early years of Harry Anslinger’s anti-drug policy,” wrote the Australian economic think tank Mises Institute article from 2016.
Anslinger was the previous head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962 and is well known as an early proponent of the War on Drugs who played a significant role within the federal criminalization of marijuana.
Cortes he wrote in a 2016 blog post that he visited the National Archives and saw letters between Anslinger and Maywood Chemical Works teaming up to distract a Life Magazine reporter about coca leaf imports.
“We don’t desire the publicity that such an article may bring us,” Maywood Chemical president MJ Hartung wrote to Anslinger in 1949.
The next yr, the Federal Narcotics Bureau filed an internal memo on the matter.
“Less publicity of articles about coca leaves and narcotics will likely be higher for the general public,” reads a July 1950 memo, where earlier reports on the topic are unsatisfactory.