> most famously Coca Cola which was Cocaine + Kola nut.
That's a common misleading myth.
Early coca cola was coca leaves and kola nut. Yes, the former contained cocaine alkaloids. But it's different from saying you take a soda and mix it with cocaine. The dosage wasn't comparable to a snorted line today.
If the dosage wasn’t doing anything tangible, which is what OP says, why does Coca Cola make an effort to decocainate coca leaves, making it a very expensive ingredient?
I think this is akin to arguing that saying coffee has caffeine in it is misleading, because it's not the same amount as one might get in a powdered concentrate of pure caffeine. Yeah, but it does have caffeine in it and Coke did have cocaine in it. And the effective dose was significant.
It was marketed precisely on this point; it being a "nerve stimulant", "brain tonic", cure all for hysteria, melancholy, and more. There's a great article on it here. [1] Coke also got defensive on this point because not only was it referred to as "dope" and other such drug implicit terms, but people also began pointing out the issues with coke and cocaine.
Nobody knows exactly how much cocaine was in the original concoctions, but it is known that they began rapidly reducing the amount once the issue started being discussed. Of course I can also see that being argued as evidence of them having a bunch (oyyy, shut it down!), or indeed having a negligible amount (bahh, let's nip this nonsense in the bud). Either way it had a very non-zero amount, and people were consuming it in absurd quantities. If you believe Coke's response, 90% of all businessmen were "constant patrons."
The point is you're arguing that it was diluted rather than concentrated cocaine. Sure, but it was indeed cocaine all the same. Cocaine tolerance is also, oddly enough, based on quantity rather than consistency. And so people taking small doses over time likely had negligible tolerance contrasted against a cokehead of today going for a bump as a warmup.
Its exact potency are going to be impossible to assess because the only people that knew how much cocaine was in each serving, early on, took it to the grave with themselves. But the thing we can say is that (1) it was very non-zero and (2) consumption of said non-zero amount of cocaine was relatively widespread.
Again I think it works very well as an analog to modern times. It's fairly certain that companies have run internal studies on addictiveness since 'engagement' is already little more than a euphemism for such, kept at arm's reach. Those studies will never see the light of day, and have almost certainly been long since wiped, so we'll never know exactly how much they knew. Other than they obviously knew and know that they're intentionally creating and providing a product that is extremely addictive, and exploiting that for economic benefit.
That's a common misleading myth.
Early coca cola was coca leaves and kola nut. Yes, the former contained cocaine alkaloids. But it's different from saying you take a soda and mix it with cocaine. The dosage wasn't comparable to a snorted line today.