COKE, DOPE, POP, SODA: IT'S THE REAL THING

On a sweltery summer morning years ago, I was talking with two elderly men
playing checkers in front of a backwater country store.

The sun was set on bake.

"Terectly when it gits hot, we'll pull up and git us a couple of dopes to
cool off," one said.

By "dopes" he was referring to soft drinks. The term was as pervasive in my
grandmother's generation as the generic "Coke" was to mine.

There is a reason the old-timers called the bottled drinks "dopes," but you
won't learn it at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta.

The three-story pantheon to pop (that's Yankee for Coke) doubles as a
monument to the American genius for advertising that made Coca-Cola the
most beloved drink on the planet. And advertising, as you are well aware,
is the art of selective information.

No one was better at it than Coca-Cola.

Progressing from floor to floor at its shrine in downtown Atlanta, a
visitor is struck by the astonishing variety of people, animals and
fictional beings used to sell Coke. Polar bears, Southern colonels, dogs,
Aretha Franklin and Santa Claus tout the pleasures of the product.

One poster depicts a dapper young Cary Grant making a pitch for Coke.
Another shows a curvaceous Claudette Colbert inviting you to "The Pause
that Refreshes."

Sex, in fact, is a theme that runs relentlessly through the history of
Coca-Cola, right down to its famous bottle, a phallus symbol with hourglass
curves. Women in its ads from the '30s and '40s radiate a Vargas-like
sensuality. Even in its earliest days, the company drew criticism for the
cuts of the bodices of its models' Victorian outfits.

The sexy styles are just one of the many fascinating things in the World of
Coca-Cola. It offers vintage TV commercials from the '50s and '60s,
boggling bottle collections, even a tasting station that allows you to
sample the company's products from around the world. If you go, be sure to
try the watermelon-flavored drink from China.

But it was the company's early advertisements that caught my attention.
They touted Coca-Cola as "brain food," an "esteemed brain tonic," a "cure
for all nervous afflictions."

That's as close as the World of Coca-Cola comes to acknowledging the story
of the soft drink's cocaine connection. It's not surprising, for it took
decades of advertising for Coke to live it down.

The Coca-Cola company line is that there was never any trace of cocaine in
the Deep South's All-World product. That may be so, but an alternative
history of Coke -- as interesting as anything in the brilliant
red-and-white shrine in Atlanta -- suggests otherwise.

An Atlanta druggist named John Styth Pemberton formulated Coke in 1886.
Popular lore, perpetuated by the World of Coca-Cola, says he cooked up the
drink in a backyard lab.

In fact, Pemberton, a former Confederate Army officer who may also have
been a morphine addict, had quite a sophisticated laboratory for his day
and time.

He was trying to emulate the success of a product called Vin Mariani that
had swept Europe. Endorsed by the likes of Queen Victoria, Pope Pius X and
Thomas A. Edison, Vin Mariani was brewed with a secret formula that
combined alcohol with the alkaloid product of coca leaves, cocaine.

The resulting coca wine was advertised as a pick-me-up that was said to
stimulate thought, banish aches and pains and make a body feel downright
good. Its advertising suggested that even small babies could benefit from
its miracle liquid.

It made its inventor rich and sparked numerous imitations, not the least of
which was Pemberton's French Wine Coca.

The Atlanta druggist combined the alcohol from "pure grape," the stimulant
from coca leaves and the potent caffeine of the African kola nut.

Pemberton claimed it could cure anything from exhaustion (undoubtedly
accurate) to constipation and "all chronic and wasting diseases" (doubtful).

But there was a problem. Atlanta was on the verge of prohibition; it would
become the first major city in the U.S. to ban alcohol. Pemberton was faced
with the choice of reformulating his product or getting out of his growing
liquid refreshment business.

Over the winter of 1886, he came up with a drink that met the city's new
prohibition code but retained the other two active ingredients. It was the
birth of the drink we know and love as Coca-Cola.

But even Coke couldn't pep up Pemberton. He went through a string of
personal and business disasters and ended up selling out to another Atlanta
druggist, Asa Candler. By 1889, Candler claimed exclusive ownership of
Coca-Cola, spending a grand total of $2,300.

Candler had an expansive vision and a genius for advertising. In a few
years, he had branched out across the country and was well on the way to
establishing Coca-Cola as a global power.

But another obstacle loomed.

It was openly rumored across the South that cocaine helped put the kick in
Coca-Cola. Southerners like my aging checker players routinely referred to
the drink as "dope" and the soda fountains where it was sold as "hop joints."

Theirs was an age of political bombast and demagoguery. Reconstruction had
ended and politicians were playing the race card.

One of the images white racist politicians found useful was the prospect of
drugged-out blacks instigating disturbances and deflowering white maidens.

Even the eminent New York Times was not immune to the dire warnings. It
tied black crime with cocaine abuse and demanded legal action against
Coca-Cola.

Closer to home, the Atlanta Constitution asked darkly, "What's in Coca-Cola?"

The use of legally available cocaine "among Negroes is growing to an
alarming extent," the newspaper opined in 1901. "It is stated that quite a
number of soft drinks dispensed at soda fountains contain cocaine, and that
these drinks serve to unconsciously cultivate the habit."

Of course, no one outside of a handful of people knew then or now what's in
Coca-Cola. Its recipe is as closely guarded as the treasured barbecue sauce
recipes of many families in the Deep South.

Yet a formula said to have been handwritten by Candler's chief assistant
shows Coca-Cola syrup contained a quarter-pound of coca leaves per gallon.

Candler responded to the Constitution article with a ponderously titled
pamphlet, "What Is It? Coca-Cola. What It Is."

It doesn't exactly spill the family secrets but he says the coca leaves'
essence "makes one active, brilliant, vigorous, and able to accomplish
great tasks easily."

That's putting a positive spin on things. But Candler is recognized
universally as an advertising genius.

Even as he was extolling the virtues of the coca leaves, he hired a firm in
New Jersey to remove any cocaine from his product's secret formula.

Depending on which alternative history you believe, Coke has been coke-free
for almost a century.

Perhaps hiring the New Jersey firm was just a maneuver to cover his rear,
to ensure that Coke doped no drinker, black or white. Candler maintained
until the end of his days that Coca-Cola never contained cocaine.

If that was a deliberately misleading strategy, it worked. By the 1980s,
there were few people alive in the South or anywhere else who associated
Coca-Cola with cocaine.

The company had other concerns by then, as well. Michael Jackson was
pushing Pepsi.

But Coke's shady past has not yet become the stuff of company museums.
Cocaine, in a different context, remains a potent political tool.

So for all the turn-of-the-century newspaper headlines over the drink's
contents, all the talk about "dopes" and "hop joints," and all the evidence
that the original concoction was a knock-off of the pleasantly narcotic Vin
Mariani, the World of Coca-Cola does not breathe a word about cocaine.

Its bright fantasy images embody a deeply ingrained Southern tradition. If
you don't mention something ugly or unpleasant, if you refuse to
acknowledge it, it doesn't really exist.

Logic may dictate otherwise, but this is our custom. A thing denied is not,
in a phrase, The Real Thing.