Really, only one word came to mind while reading this book: HORRIBLE!

After reading other reviews, I can't believe anyone would say, "Wow!" after reading this book. It is shaped like a hardcover children's book and reads and is illustrated like one too, except, of course, the word "cocaine" doesn't often make an appearance in books written for children.

The book's title is misleading, but that doesn't stop Mr. Cortes from continuing his theme of sweetheart deals crafted by wayward government employees (e.g., kickbacks are alluded to but not specified) for Coca-Cola's financial success (i.e., source of funds for hinted-at kickbacks).

This book reveals no secrets. The company that imports coca leaves for Coca-Cola has a government-issued licence to do so. Every step of the process is transparent, highly regulated, and not at all unusual. Everyday, government-issued licenses allow some companies and individuals to do certain tasks that those who lack a license may not do. Easy example: physicians have a jurisdiction-specific, government-issued license to prescribe, order, administer, dispense, and/or procure prescription medications. To do so without a license is a crime.

The fact that coca leaves are imported to the United States, have their cocaine content removed, and then are shipped to be used as an ingredient to make Coca-Cola syrup has never been a secret. The information may have startled the author (and, just saying, he formerly wrote a book about the perks of marijuana; if that's where his expertise lies, then, yeah, I can see why Coca-Cola's coca leaves surprised him but that doesn't mean Americans at large have been denied information).

About 100 years ago, Coca-Cola chemists and executives fiddled with the original recipe. Federal agents had seized gallons of Coca-Cola syrup, which were the defendants in a case that made its way to the Supreme Court. (That's right, the syrup was the defendant ... not the humans who made the syrup. This happens a lot too.) The issue was not -- nor is now -- the cocaine content of the drink. Caffeine was considered an adulterant, robbing consumers of good health, and not a natural ingredient in the recipe. During the years that passed as the case moved upward and was then remanded downward, the folks at Coca-Cola decided to exit litigation by drastically lowering the syrup's caffeine content and, around the same time, ditched cocaine as well because the executives in Atlanta saw a prohibition against that drug coming. ( )

A very interresting book. At first, this appears to be an easy book, a hi-lo. However, it is a complex story told succinctly. An eye-opener too. Back material includes epilogue, author's note, and bibliography. ( )

Amazing illustrations, and this book shows yet again American double standards. Coca for corporate profits is legal, but for other reasons is not. ( )

As it happens, intoxicants framed my yesterday.

Mornings start with a good belt of caffeine from at least two cups of coffee. Caffeine may crop up elsewhere during my day with more coffee or, more usually, tea.

My evening cocktail was built on two more. One, dark rum, is legal (though prohibited by Constitutional amendment and federal statute for nearly 14 years); the other, while nominally illegal worldwide, has been part of the world’s most popular soft drink since John Pemberton first blended it into his fizzy sugar water.

The “soft” of soft drinks such as Pemberton’s brew contrasts with the hardness of spiritous liquors such as rum and whiskey. Curiously, then, Pemberton included extracts of kola nuts and coca leaves in what would become the world’s most popular soft drink.

Ricardo Cortes, who illustrated the delicious Go the Fuck to Sleep and its G-rated sibling Seriously Just Go to Sleep, describes the ongoing connection between the alkaloid derivatives of coffee beans, kola nuts, and coca leaves and Coca-Cola.

In 1914, the United States banned coca and its alkaloid derivative, cocaine, with the Harrison Narcotics Act. Internationally, by 1961 nine separate treaties and other agreements had erected a complicated system of drug control; the United Nations began negotiations to simplify that thicket. During those negotiations the US browbeat the world into mandating eradicating the coca plant; that browbeating bore fruit in the 1971 Convention on Pyschotropic Substances and the 1988 Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. While prohibiting people from chewing coca leaves, the conventions allow the world’s most popular soft drink to use coca; unsurprisingly, that exception grew out of a connection between a bureaucrat and a corporation supplying a coca derivative to Coca-Cola bottlers according to Cortes.

Cortes’ excellent journalism -- laying out the money driven inconsistencies in our supposed War on Drugs -- is enhanced by his illustrations (including, tellingly, a reproduction of a 1964 IRS filing purporting that the Maywood Division of the Stepan Chemical Co. imported up to three pounds of coca leaves to the University of Hawaii’s Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station on Kauai; in the event, while the climate of the Hawaiian Islands is suitable for coca culture, seedlings succumbed to wilting and rot rot of unknown source).
The Drug War is filled with unexplainable inconsistencies and injustices. A Secret Histor of Coffee, Coca & Cola illuminates a few of the more glaring ( )