Coca leaves have been chewed and consumed as tea for thousands of years in the high Andes. They are rich in many essential nutrients; they ease respiratory and digestive distress and are a natural stimulant and painkiller. Indigenous tradition and scientific studies have both confirmed that in their natural form, the leaves are completely safe and non-addictive — it takes intensive processing and toxic chemical ingredients to produce cocaine. That’s why more and more coca-containing products have started to hit the market in Andean countries in the past few years.
Yet the United States still aggressively pursues an eradication policy that encourages Andean governments to spray their forests with toxic chemicals to eliminate this medicinal crop. It is illegal to import or possess the leaves under U.S. law — unless you’re the Coca-Cola company. In an effort to preserve the traditional flavor of the best-selling drink, the company long ago convinced the U.S. government to exempt it from the law.
(Coca-Cola, by the way, used to literally contain cocaine in its original formula. The practice was halted in 1903, but the name persisted. The “coca” part of “coca-cola” is derived from the coca plant, and the “kola” comes from the kola nut which also flavored the original beverage.)
The secret history of Coca-Cola, coca leaves and cocaine
Coca-Cola is the only U.S. corporation that has been granted the right to legally import coca leaves into the United States, via a coca processing lab known as the Stepan Company). In 1922, the Jones-Miller Act banned cocaine imports into the United States, but Coca-Cola (and its lab) was granted an exception. This exception remained a secret until the late 1980’s when the New York Times seemed shocked to discover the truth.
As the New York Times published in 1988 (http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-obtains-its-…)
This week, details of how Coca-Cola obtains the coca and how it is processed emerged from interviews with Government officials and scientists involved in drug research programs. They identified the Illinois-based Stepan Company as the importer and processor of the coca used in Coke. After Stepan officials acknowledged their ties to Coca-Cola, the soft drink giant confirmed those details of its operations.
In a telephone interview from Coca-Cola’s Atlanta headquarters, Randy Donaldson, a company spokesman, said, ”Ingredients from the coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.”
100 tons of cocaine ingredients each year – let’s do the math
Approximately 100 metric tons of coca leaves are imported to the Stepan Company each year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company) under “special permission” from the DEA. Keep all this in mind when you consider the total fraud of the current “War on Drugs” and how young African American men are given ten-year prison sentences for pot possession while one of the largest corporations in America is actually importing leaves that are used to manufacture cocaine.
Once the coca leaves are imported into the USA under these special permissions from the DEA, the cocaine is extracted out of the coca leaves. Coca-Cola doesn’t use the cocaine, you see. There is no cocaine in Coca-Cola today.
This brings up an obvious question: Where does all the white powder cocaine go if not to Coca-Cola? It turns out that this cocaine is sold to a St. Louis company called Mallinckrodt Incorporated.
Mallinckrodt receives not only all the cocaine from the Coca-Cola imports, but also imports opium from India (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallinckrodt). In addition, this company also buys THC extracted from marijuana grown in the United States. So much for the War on Drugs, huh? It turns out if you buddy up to the DEA and federal regulators, you can make all the cocaine you want while buying opium and marijuana by the ton — as long as you’re a powerful corporation with ties to Coca-Cola and other wealthy organizations.
More than a quarter ton of cocaine for “medicinal” use?
It’s a reasonable question to wonder where all this cocaine and opium ends up going after it arrives at Mallinckrodt. The official explanation is that it’s for “medical use.” But let’s do the math on this and see if that explanation holds water.
According to various websites that are readily found in any search engine, it takes roughly 300 grams of coca leaves to produce 1 gram of refined cocaine. This means that 100 metric tons of coca leaves (100 x 1000 kilograms, or 100,000 kilograms) can produce roughly 333 kilos of cocaine each year.
Ask around… That’s a lot of cocaine. Remember, too, that these are 333 kilos of cocaine approved by the DEA — an agency which claims to be fighting a “war on drugs” but somehow grants immunity to Coca-Cola suppliers who are literally manufacturing hundreds of kilos of cocaine each year.
All this brings up the obvious question: What is the Mallinckrodt company doing with 333 kilos of cocaine each year? Throwing a big annual Christmas party or something? It is impossible to imagine that 333 kilos of cocaine are being used for “medical purposes” unless you have a very loose definition of “medical purposes.” Although this is pure conjecture, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if a significant portion of this was handed out to top DEA officials as bribes to pay them off and keep the cocaine operation running.