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The most expensive and famous type of drug, cocaine, originally comes from the leaves of coca trees native to Peru and Bolivia in South America.
This coca leaf was used during the Inca Empire as an anesthetic for patients undergoing skull resection or as a tonic for workers carrying heavy loads.
Then in 1533, when Pizarro’s Spanish army conquered the Inca, coca leaves became known to Europeans, and many years later, in 1855, the German chemist Friedrich Ghattke succeeded in extracting cocaine, a drug substance, from coca leaves, and cocaine became a tonic for Europeans to forget fatigue and cheer them up.
One of them was Mariani Wine, a wine that the whole world was crazy about from 1863 to 1914.
Angelo Mariani, a French chemist and pharmacist from Corsica, started making and selling Mariani wines named after him in 1863.
This Mariani wine was red wine with 10 alcohols and 85 cocaine.
Mariani wine was enjoyed by most of the world’s celebrities at the time, including Britain’s Queen Victoria, the novelist HG Wells, who wrote the space war, and the French gatekeeper Emil Zola Jules Verne, the Roman Catholic Pope, Thomas Edison, and President Ulysses Grant.
Edison, the inventor who slept only four hours a day, relieved his fatigue by drinking Mariani wine, and U.S. President Ulysses Grant drank Mariani wine every day to forget the pain of injuries he suffered during the Civil War.
Pope Leo XIII was also impressed by the taste of Mariani’s wine and praised it as a benefactor of mankind, even sending a golden medal to Angelo Mariani, who made Mariani’s wine.
And as Mariani became popular, there were products that copied it, and one of them was Coca-Cola.
In May 1886, John Pemberton, a pharmacist in Atlanta, U.S., launched Coca-Cola, a drink made by mixing cola tree fruit powder with cocaine, and started selling it.
Coca-Cola was originally a wine containing cocaine and cola nuts, so its name was French Coca-Cola, but it happened to pass the prohibition law, which prevented him from selling alcohol in Atlanta, so Pamberton took out the wine and changed it to Coca-Cola instead.
But in the early 20th century, when international medical circles announced that cocaine was a harmful drug, Coca-Cola was released in 1903 as a carbonated drink that increased the amount of caffeine by taking out all the cocaine, and Mariani Wine eventually disappeared in 1914.
No one remembers the original Mariani wine now, but the copycat Coca-Cola is now the world’s largest drinker, and the whereabouts of history are truly ironic.