5 Regular Things That Used to Be Full of Drugs

5 Soda

It’s unlikely, unless this is the first thing you’ve ever read (in which case, congrats) that you haven’t heard the old chestnut about Coca-Cola containing cocaine. Though it fully seems like something invented for drunk acquaintances to slur out around round five, it’s based in truth. It wasn’t in there for long, and apparently never in amounts big enough to launch any small businesses, but it was there. If mood stabilizers are more your kind of party, you could have gone for the lesser-known pharmaceutical soda, 7-Up. Now known mostly as “basically Sprite,” the original 7-Up contained lithium.

4 Wine

Apparently, when cocaine was getting stuck in everything known to man, one product made for the most efficient partying I’ve ever heard of. The product in question was “Coca Wine,” and it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like — wine with cocaine included, like you’d vacuumed it right out of a swinger party’s couch stain and poured it into a bottle. One particularly popular brand was Vin Mariani, swilled by fans the world over (including, apparently, some popes) and leaving them grinding their now purple teeth.

3 Cigarettes

At a certain time in history, there would have been zero need to ever bring cocaine to a party, because it was already included in everything you’d ingest there, even without touching a drop of alcohol. In these wild times, people were perfectly happy to manufacture and smoke cigarettes containing cocaine, the kind of thing that seems like it would have been invented by a day trader in the heat of a contentious divorce. These were no smooth smokes, either. Given that nicotine enhances the effects of cocaine, they probably sent your brain spinning like a hamster wheel hooked up to a motorcycle drive chain.

2 Cough Syrup

Wake up with a cough after a long night of consuming a variety of cocaine delivery vehicles? Well, the answer might have been on your nightstand in the form of cough syrup, which, at the time, might have meant a generous dose of heroin. To be fair, you’d definitely feel relief — coursing through your body in a way that might have you chasing that feeling for the rest of your life, in fact. Serving size? Ironically enough, a teaspoon.

1 Drugs Themselves

Or, if you were low on time and didn’t have the bandwidth to ingest multiple things cut with drugs that are now federally banned, you could instead pick up what were known as “patent drugs.” Things like consumer protection and “listing ingredients” were still a long way off, so you could pretty much stick your own signature slurry into a bottle and sell it as medicine. 

This wasn’t purely a snake oil situation, however, because plenty of patent drugs were extremely powerful. Not effective, mind you, but powerful, since they were packed with a smorgasbord of drugs like cocaine, heroin, opium, etc. They cured ailments the same way that a mudslide technically fixes a pothole.