Coca Wine, anyone?

Metcalf Coca Wine was one of a huge variety of wines with cocaine on the market. Everybody
used to say that it would make you happy and it would also work as a medicinal treatment.

Mariani wine

Mariani wine (1875) was the most famous Coca wine of it's time. Pope Leo XIII used to carry one bottle
with him all the time. He awarded Angelo Mariani (the producer) with a Vatican gold medal.

Angelo Mariani or Ange-François Mariani (1838 Pero-Casevecchie, Haute-Corse - 1914) was a French chemist,
originally from the island of Corsica. He is most well known as the inventor of the first cocawine, Vin
Mariani in 1863. His contribution was to introduce the coca leaf indirectly to the general public. Mariani
imported tons of coca leaves and used an extract from them in many products. It was Mariani's coca wine,
though, that made him rich and famous. Mariani was also awarded with a medal of appreciation from the Pope.LOLROTF!
This tonic wine is deemed as the Coca Cola ancestor. Indeed the original composition of the soft
drink from Atlanta is clearly inspired from the French cocawine.

At the end of the 19th century, the fear of drug abuse made coca-based drinks less popular. This eventually led to
the prohibition of cocaine in the United States, and the removal of cocaine from coca wine as well as Coca-Cola
(though coca leaf remained). The drink itself essentially became illegal when its other main drug, alcohol,
was banned just a few years later under alcohol prohibition.

In the forty years between 1865 and 1905 a great many patent medicines, pain killers, hair tonics and even some
relaxing beverages proudly advertised the use of cocaine as an active ingredient. That’s a forty year
window of cocaine-as-medicine rela...

Coca Cola's secret ingredients

Even after the cocaine was removed from the coca leaves used to make Coca Cola (c. 1906), the product was still
sold for its medicinal effects. Today the company generally refuses to comment on the use of coca leaves in their product.