Harvey Wiley Sugar Legacy

New York City's Mayor Bloomberg seeks to ban certain establishments from offering sugared drink sizes above 16 ounces.  No word how this shall impact my 32 ounce McDonald's *half* sweetened, *half* unsweetened habit which gives me the larger drink but with the limit of the 16 ounce size sweetened.  No mention is given to the sugar-high fructose corn syrup issue.

This makes me wonder about the per-cigarette mercantilism days -- aka the early 1900s cocaine demonification scares of the infamous USDA-AMA-APhA drug racketeering to get people to fear cocaine in any form in order to clear the way for the increased marketing of Tobacco cigarettes -- when Coca Cola and other such soft drinks contained cocaine.  Small amounts of cocaine, often 3-4 milligrams per fluid ounce, or 6 or 7 milligrams per fluid ounce as in Coca wines such as Vin Mariani.

Do the math.  If say a Coca leaf extract or even isolated cocaine beverages contained for the sake of argument 1.5 milligrams per fluid ounce, the amount cited by Stephen Karch for Coca-Cola: 

12 milligrams in the 8 ounce drink; 

18 mg in the 12 ounce drink; 

24 mg in the 16 ounce; 

48 in the 32; and 

96mg in the 64 ounce.  

Such an era came when soft drink sizes were relatively low- in the 8 ounce/12mg cocaine to 12 ounce/18 mg cocaine range; without or with caffeine, such as Coca-Cola.

Now do the logic.  Cocaine is not just a stimulant.  Cocaine is also an anesthetic- drink a cocaine containing beverage  and one does not simply get a mild stimulant effect, one's stomach numbs out and one looses an appetite for more, making it somewhat self limiting.  Try it yourself with some Coca tea (I do NOT recommend using street cocaine unless perhaps one is a sufficiently trained pharmacist), made with say 4 or 5 bags per large cup and you will find it way less swill-able than a standard caffeine beverage or water.   

Makes me wonder how much excessive consumption of sugar was initiated by removing the whole coca-cocaine alkaloid from soft drinks, removing the "I am full signal" so people would drink larger servings.

I am sure there is a whole science within the food and drug and beverage industry to encourage excessive consumption, as with MSG type 'doping', and the burn additives in cigarettes.

Perhaps there's a trove of secreted research of 'poison squad" USDA related research on the interactions between the consumption of a range of products, involving a whole range of agricultural products, including all sorts of "habit-forming" things including sugar, soft drinks, Coffee, tea, and of course Coca and of Tobacco.  Research showing the effects of each taken separately, or together, to see how they interact, particularly drugs with overlapping uses: caffeine, cocaine, and nicotine; beverages, chewables and various forms of smokes.  Yes, we not only had cocainated soft drinks (as well as Coca Wines as Vin Mariani), we had Coca leaf cigars, cheroots and cigarettes- either alone or blended some way with Tobacco, and described as roughly equivalent in potency to drinking Coffee. 

Such as that showing that Coca soft drinks were shackling the sales growth of mass machine produced Tobacco cigarettes - the Bonsack machine was patented in 1881, yet the sales growth was relatively slow until 1907 with the irresponsible elimination of cocaine from beverages, eliminating the competition to and potential addiction relief potential from Tobacco.

British and French and North Americans Examine Coca: 1870s-1880s
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.fr/2008/03/british-and-french-and-north-americans.html


Sugar Promoter Harvey Washington Wiley
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/08/sugar-pusher-harvey-wiley.html