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Cocaine comes from coca leaves. If you have ever had a Coca Cola, you have tasted extract from the coca leaf, though with the cocaine (hallucinogen) removed.

Opium is found in poppy seeds which are used to top bread. Some US military members will refrain from eating bread with poppy seeds because it can cause them to fail random drug tests required by military service. This can potentially get you booted with a dishonorable discharge.



Cocaine isn't a hallucinogen, it's a stimulant.


Cocaine is a central nervous system stimulant that can, under some conditions, be a halucinogen.

https://www.answers.com/Q/Is_cocaine_a_hallucinogen_stimulan...

It was originally part of the Coca Cola formula and was removed because it is the psychoactive ingredient. They still use coca extract in Coca Cola, but it no longer makes you high.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cocaine-coca-cola/


It was removed due to cost and caffiene being more stimulating, and addictive. Looming regulations also played a part.

The amount in cola, or in any generally unrefined state, aka, not powder, is highly unlukely to have any psychoactive effects.


Unrefined coca is less stimulating. Seeing as refined cocaine was being used in products marketed to infants and children and well understood (by professionals at least) to be fantastically habit forming, I think the pivot to caffeine was somewhere between 99-100% influenced by the impending narcotics regulations.


Hmm, so, I somewhat take your point about opium, although the flavour of poppy seeds is vastly different from the bitter taste of opium.

I've tried coca leaves in Peru (supposedly they help with altitude sickness; I didn't get altitude sickness, but who knows!) - they are used by locals because they are a stimulant, not because they taste nice (they're not particularly bad, a kind of generic "herbal" taste, but certainly nothing you'd purposely add for flavour).


Lots of people drink coffee for the caffeine and don't actually enjoy the flavor. Chocolate is quite bitter if you don't add a bunch of sugar to it.


Do they though?

Everyone I know who doesn't like coffee drinks tea (or more rarely yerba mata).

> Chocolate is quite bitter if you don't add a bunch of sugar to it

But it does at least have a very desirable flavour when some sugar is added (it really doesn't need "a bunch" :)

Opium is like the essence of bitterness - in flavour terms, it had no redeemable qualities whatsoever.


And professionals who are around medicines. And pilots. And people in other jobs subject to random testing (refinery/powerplant crews).


Why would they use such a sloppy test to justify a dishonorable discharge? Surely you must have some other priors...




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