Coca-Cola

Even the Coca-Cola Company regards as out of the ordinary—though it is rather fond of the old girl—a wrinkled Indian woman in a remote Mexican province who told an inquiring explorer in 1954 that she had never heard of the United States but had heard of Coke. (There are fifty-one plants in Mexico that bottle it.) Two years after that, a Coca-Cola man pushed a hundred and fifty miles into the jungles outside Lima, Peru, in search of a really primitive Indian to whom, for publicity purposes, he could introduce Coca-Cola. Deep in the bush, he flushed a likely-looking woman, and, through an interpreter, explained his errand, whereupon the woman reached into a sack she was carrying, plucked forth a bottle of Coke, and offered him a swig.

There can be exceedingly few North Americans who are unacquainted with Coca-Cola, which a Swedish sociologist has said bears the same nourishing relationship to the body of Homo americanus that television does to his soul. One such ignoramus came to light ten years ago, when the Army quizzed six hundred and fifty recruits stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Two hundred and twenty-nine of them had never heard of Louisville, twenty miles away; eighty-five had never been to the dentist; and twenty-one had never tasted cow’s milk. A single soldier had never drunk a Coke. All in all it was a set of findings far more encouraging to the Coca-Cola Company than to the Department of Defense.

In contrast to that innocent rookie, some of his fellow-citizens drink Coca-Cola at a staggering clip. “You can drink Coke every day all day long and you don’t get tired of it,” a member of the company’s indefatigable market-research staff has said. “Fifteen minutes after you’ve finished a Coke, you’re a new customer again, and that’s where we’ve got you.” One of the most faithful customers on record is an Alabama woman who on her ninety-seventh birthday attributed her durability to her habit of consuming a Coca-Cola at exactly ten o’clock every morning since the stuff first came on the market, in 1886. Possibly the outstanding Coke drinker of all time is a used-car salesman in Memphis who revealed in 1954, when he was sixty-five, that for fifty years he had been averaging twenty-five bottles daily, and that on some days he had hit fifty. He added, inevitably, that he had attended the funerals of half a dozen doctors who had called his pace killing.

from a 1959 New Yorker article, “The Universal Drink,” by E. J. Kahn Jr., bolds mine. (I was looking up every New Yorker article that mentions Memphis – not many!)

Recently scoured up a Reddit thread on the topic of how much cocaine you’d need to add to modern day Coca-Cola to recreate the original. The conclusion was you’d need to add tons, and it wouldn’t have much effect anyway: a modern caffeinated Coke gets you way more amped than the old coca version.