Category: American Reform

• The "Cocaine" Temperance Plot

  This theory held that temperance reformers, while publicly denouncing alcohol, secretly helped normalize cocaine or coca-based stimulant drinks in order to push people away from beer and wine. In its strongest form, the movement appears as a moral shell hiding chemical substitution: take away alcohol, introduce another habit. The documented record clearly shows that temperance pressure did help encourage the growth of non-alcoholic alternatives and that some late nineteenth-century beverages and tonics, including early Coca-Cola’s predecessor forms, were connected to coca and cocaine. What remains unproven is the claim of a coordinated temperance plan to addict the public to cocaine.