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The lone U.S. factory authorized to import coca leaves has had its licence renewed by the Drug Enforcement Agency in 2023.
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The New Jersey-based Stepan Company facility has been processing coca leaves for Coca-Cola for more than a century, reports The New York Post.
Importing coca leaves was banned in 1921 but an exception was made for Maywood Chemical Works, which operated the factory before its acquisition by Stepan Company in 1959.
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While the original 19th-century Coca-Cola recipe did contain a residual amount of cocaine precursor, it was largely reduced by the early part of the century and eliminated by 1930.
These days, the coca leaves are used to create a “decocainized” flavouring ingredient, while the residual byproduct is sold to Mallinckrodt, an opioid company that manufactures a numbing agent commonly used by dentists.
The DEA did not respond to a Daily Mail request for comment about how much coca the company currently imports but previous reports indicate that more than 500 tonnes of leaves could be processed in the factory annually.
In the 2012 book A Secret History of Coffee, Coca and Cola, author Ricardo Cortés wrote that the National Company of the Coca, a Peruvian state-owned company, exported about 95 tonnes of coca leaves to Maywood each year between 2007 and 2010.
The legal exemption has helped the company grow into a global giant worth more than US$265 billion, according to economic historian Chris Calton.
“Coca-Cola’s success as the mega-company it is today is due, at least in part, to special privileges granted by government during the Second World War, and the suppression of potential competitors in the early years of Harry Anslinger’s anti-drug policies,” Calton wrote in a 2016 article published by Australian economics think tank Mises Institute.
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In the 1930s, as competitors to Maywood, like S.B. Penick Company, tried to get permission to purchase coca leaf flavouring ingredients, they were denied by Anslinger, the head of the federal Bureau of Narcotics.
“The federal government was officially working to suppress potential Coca-Cola competitors,” Calton writes.
In 2023, two Canadian companies were granted amendments to their dealer’s licenses from Health Canada to legally possess, produce, sell and distribute coca leaf and cocaine to other licence holders, such as hospitals and pharmacies.
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