David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Really? I didn’t know Dr. Pepper was that old. Dr. Pepper predates Coca-Cola. And of course, Coca-Cola started just the same way as a patent medicine. Which brings us to Dr. John Pemberton, a confederate war veteran, who had not only been stabbed, he had also been shot during the war, and got army disease just like all these other soldiers, and was addicted to morphine for the rest of his life. After the war, he moves to Atlanta, and as part of his entrepreneurial aspirations in this new patent medicine consumer economy, and also to probably solve his own problem, he starts casting about for other drugs that could cure him and others of army disease. That is how in the mid-1880s, he learns about a new miracle drug sweeping America, promising to cure all ills including army disease, cocaine. Cocaine was really, really in America in the 1880s, perhaps foreshadowing a little bit the 1980s in America, as we will get to later in the episode. Except in the 1880s, it’s really legal and really broadly encouraged. Certainly there’s no FDA or anything to make it illegal, but society’s posture toward cocaine wasn’t bad.…

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