Wilson newspaper warns against ‘pernicious tipple’

“[By 1903] it hardly mattered that Coca-Cola contained nothing but the merest trace of either drug named in its trademark. People were growing frightened….’Every ingredient [in Coca-Cola] is a poison,’ the Wilson (N.C.) Daily News warned its readers, ‘and not long hence each unhappy victim of this pernicious tipple, like the opium fiend of the East, may take his neighbor by the hand and say, “Brother, what ailed thee, to seek so dire a cure?” ‘ ”

— From “Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing & Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best Known Product in the World” by Frederick Allen (1999)

 

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