"coca-leaf which comes from South America and is processed in a unique US government authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant cocaine"
Consider the implications of one of the largest American companies being singularly authorized to buy and import hundreds of tons of coca leaf, which is banned in nearly every country and produced primarily by illegal drug manufacturers. Does anyone believe there's no funny business going on here?
(For the record, I think coca and cocaine should be legal.)
>The Stepan Company (a $400 million American Stock Exchange company) of Maywood, New Jersey imports 175,000 KG of coca leaves into the United States each year. The leaves come from some of the same farms that supply the Columbian drug cartels.
>Flavor scientists say that the mysterious essence has no significant taste of its own , but acts as an 'enhancer' PepsiCo Inc. does not use the coca leaf. Flavor scientist Nicholas Feurstein thinks that the average guzzler might well notice the difference if Coke stopped using it.
>The leaf is ground up, mixed with sawdust, soaked in bicarbonate of soda, percolated with toluene, steam blasted, mixed with powdered Kola nuts, and then pasteurized. The Coke-Cola company, forever fearful of the DEA and the drug lords, is a stickler on security and quality. Drug lords have a less formal way to extract cocaine: they use kerosene as a solvent; the drug leaches out like tea from a tea bag. Cocaine is then recovered by evaporation.
From what I recall, a non polar solvent such as kerosene is used in the crude extraction of cocaine. However, it's very very unlikely that "cocaine is then recovered by evaporation" since kerosene is obtained by the fractional distillation of crude oil starting at 150C. Even if it were possible to evaporate off the kerosene to obtain freebase cocaine it would be amazingly dangerous.
The actual cocaine refining process, I believe, is a fairly typical polar/non-polar acid/base extraction.
"coca-leaf which comes from South America and is processed in a unique US government authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant cocaine"
Consider the implications of one of the largest American companies being singularly authorized to buy and import hundreds of tons of coca leaf, which is banned in nearly every country and produced primarily by illegal drug manufacturers. Does anyone believe there's no funny business going on here?
(For the record, I think coca and cocaine should be legal.)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/apr/19/20040419-093...