Coca-Cola's cocaine past and present
reading the coca tea leaves of food law ghosts
During Pandemic Times, I red For God, Country and Coca-Cola peer inside the world where Coca-Cola first made sense: patent medicines, traveling salesmen, pharmacists who blurred the line between relief and refreshment because the line barely existed. Dr. John S. Pemberton reads less like a visionary in that context and more like a man working inside the logic of his time. Food was survival or a tonic. Were you buying medicine or mental reassurance? If you wanted legitimacy, you found it from the pharmacy, because that was where trust lived.
The chapters on World War II feel familiar if you’ve ever been in a food company (or any company) under raw material constraint. Sugar rationing, distribution bottlenecks, bottling plants following troops across oceans for a taste of FREEDOM. Coca-Cola endured, and through doing so, it aligned itself perfectly with the machinery of the state. That story has been told well and often. Scale, after all, rarely happens by accident. What stopped me short was not a grand narrative beat but a quieter fact: Coca-Cola still imports coca leaves.
Not historically. Not symbolically. Literally still today.
Fi and I are heading to Peru soon (send recs), and that detail lodged itself in my mind more firmly than it probably would have otherwise. I have family members who’ve struggled with altitude sickness when arriving in Colorado from the Midwest. We talked about coca tea since my brother lived in Quito, so it comes up in those conversations the way it does for anyone who’s spent time in the Andes: casually, practically, without reverence. It’s a leaf in hot water that locals swear by for altitude sickness (even if it’s not proven to work). Not much to it.
For a moment, I wondered whether I could bring some back. Thankfully, I checked first. (read about my issues with peanut butter)
You can’t import coca leaves. You can’t import coca tea. You can’t import extracts, powders, or tinctures. Anything containing its compound of concern, cocaine, in any amount is prohibited. The only exception is a narrow one: a single, licensed industrial pipeline that imports coca leaves for the express purpose of removing the compound that makes everyone nervous. Outside that aperture, the leaf ain’t coming in.
Somehow a big song in my youth…I was a weird middle-schooler.
This isn’t an accident or a moral judgment. It’s the shape of regulation doing what it was designed to do. U.S. food and drug law doesn’t optimize for cultural context or *gasp* everyday use (good thing caffeine got through). It optimizes for worst-case outcomes at scale. Once a plant contains a compound that can be isolated, concentrated, and abused, the system stops caring about how that plant is actually used in the world. The claim isn’t that coca tea is dangerous. The claim is that cocaine has a significantly high potential for abuse, which, like, fair enough.
That’s why coca leaves are illegal in a suitcase but legal inside a tightly controlled factory. Not because one is safer in any intuitive sense, but because one is legible to the regulatory system. Stepan Company is the only company permitted to import and process coca leaves in the United States. At its facility, the leaves are processed into two regulated outputs. The first is a decocainized coca leaf extract, purchased by The Coca-Cola Company for use as a flavoring.
The second is a purified cocaine isolate, which is sold into the pharmaceutical supply chain and used as a Schedule II drug, primarily as a topical anesthetic and vasoconstrictor in nasal and ophthalmic procedures. The plant is acceptable only when every fraction is accounted for, assigned a buyer, and tracked through an approved use. Control matters more than intent, and predictability matters more than tradition. This is why Coca-Cola never fully exited its pharmaceutical past: the regulatory framework did not evolve away from that arrangement, it stabilized around it. A single importer, processor, flavor customer, and medical outlet minimizes ambiguity and satisfies enforcement logic.
Once you start looking for it, this pattern shows up everywhere in modern food. Our grocery stores still answer to drug law, trade law, and enforcement logic as much as they do to agriculture or cuisine. The FDA didn’t so much replace those systems as layer itself on top of them, inheriting their anxieties and constraints. Ingredients persist because they were early enough, comprehendible for the time they entered this system, or powerful enough to survive regulatory crystallization.
This is where self-affirmed GRAS gets interesting. In theory, it’s an openness valve, a way to introduce new ingredients without waiting for years of formal review. In practice, it’s usable only by those who can afford the legal scaffolding, the toxicology studies, and the reputational risk. The current scrutiny from HHS exposes the underlying tension that never really goes away: do we want safety through permission, or safety through evidence and iteration? Both models reduce harm. They just reduce different kinds.
Europe answers that question more conservatively. Novel foods approvals are slower and narrower. There are fewer surprises, fewer failures, and fewer uncomfortable debates. There are also fewer chances to encounter something genuinely unfamiliar. For every person that sees a bug in this system, another sees a feature.
We regulate food to protect public health, ecosystems, and trust. We also decide, quietly and permanently, which experiments never get run, which traditions remain geographically trapped, and which flavors never get the chance to mean anything to anyone else. Coca leaves aren’t interesting because of cocaine. They’re interesting because they show how narrow the channel between “allowed” and “forbidden” really is.
When we regulate food, we don’t just reduce risk. We set the limits of curiosity. And once those limits harden, most of us stop noticing what we’re no longer able to try, hoping to break off this shell through travel and experiencing what other food systems find banal.