Free Now I Know by Dan Lewis Page A

never materialized.
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    BONUS FACT
    MLK’s birthday became a holiday in 1986, but some states were slow to adopt it. It would not be celebrated in all fifty states until 2000, and Mississippi celebrates it in conjunction with the birthday of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, born January 19, 1807.
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COLA ENFORCEMENT AGENCY
HOW COKE GETS ITS COKE
    In 1886, Atlanta, Georgia, passed a short-lived law prohibiting the sale and/or manufacture of alcohol. In response, a pharmacist named John Pemberton created a faux wine, mixing together fruit flavors with extracts from kola nuts (caffeine) and coca leaves (cocaine). He dispensed it via soda fountains—at the time, carbonated water was believed to have a medicinal benefit—and with that, Coca-Cola was born.
    The original Coke formula had a significant amount of cocaine in it, but that was quickly stemmed and, by 1903 or thereabouts, eliminated from the recipe. This was done, in part, because the desired flavor can be extracted from the coca leaves, thereby removing the cocaine, setting the drug aside as a by-product. To this day, Coca-Cola needs coca leaves to make its drinks; as a Coke exec told
The
New York Times
, “Ingredients from the coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.”
    In fact, the United States (and most other nations) expressly prohibits the sale and trade of coca leaves. In order for Coca-Cola to continue to exist in its current form, the company has a special arrangement with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) allowing Coke to import dried coca leaves from Peru in huge quantities (and to a lesser degree, from Bolivia). The dried coca leaves make their way to a processing plant in Maywood, New Jersey, operated by the Stepan Corporation, a publicly traded chemicals company. The Stepan factory imports roughly 100 metric tons of the leaves each year, stripping the active ingredient—cocaine—from them. The cocaine-free leaves are then shipped off to Coke to turn into syrup, and, ultimately, soda.
    What does Stepan do with the cocaine? It goes to the Mallinckrodt Group, which creates a legal, topical anesthesia called cocaine hydrochloride. Cocaine hydrochloride is used to numb the lining of the mouth, nose, or throat and requires a DEA order form to obtain.
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    BONUS FACT
    Legend has it that Coca-Cola’s recipe contains a mystery flavoring, known as the “7X flavor.” It is heavily guarded. In early 2011,
This American Life
broadcast an episode discussing a potential early recipe for the drink but almost certainly not the one in use today. (Coke denied that NPR had discovered the true formula.) In that episode, Mark Pendergrast, author of
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola
, an unauthorized history of the company (and beverage), said that “only two people know how to mix the 7X flavoring ingredient” and that “[t]hose two people never travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it’s this carefully passed-on secret ritual, and the formula is kept in a bank vault.”
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MR. ACID
HOW AMERICA GOT ITS LSD
    The typical LSD “hit” has about 100 micrograms of the drug in it. At the high end, that means a gram contains about 10,000 doses. A kilogram of LSD has about 10 million hits in it. It should go without saying that a kilo of LSD is a whole lot of acid.
    But not for William Leonard Pickard. At his peak, Pickard was producing a kilogram of the stuff every five weeks.
    Pickard was born in California in 1945; his father was a lawyer and his mother an expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (better known as the CDC). He graduated from Purdue University and returned to California to study advanced chemistry, ending up with a high-level position at UCLA’s Drug Policy Research Program in the 1980s. How he obtained his knowledge of drugs and drug making is unclear, but we are sure of one thing: He made a whole lot of LSD.
    In 1988, Pickard was making LSD at