Wade Davis says Coca-Cola got the one coca loophole in the 1961 UN drug treaty

The funniest loophole in international drug policy may be carbonated. On The Tim Ferriss Show, Wade Davis says the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs made one very special allowance for coca leaf, the plant treated elsewhere as a global menace, so Coca-Cola could keep getting its secret flavoring.

That sounds like a dorm-room conspiracy theory written on a whiteboard next to a pyramid and the word “sheeple.” It is not. The real-world version is less lizard-brained and more bureaucratic, which is somehow funnier. The treaty does allow coca leaves to be used for flavoring agents after alkaloids are removed. Coca-Cola has long been associated with decocainized coca extract. And Stepan Company, in Maywood, New Jersey, is widely reported as the legal U.S. processor of imported coca leaves.

And what’s more, in the in the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs, there was one specific exclusion of Kulka solely for that company.

Davis’s version has the heat turned up. “Solely for that company” is the advocate’s flourish, not a footnoted law-review sentence. But the core claim lands: coca leaf is restricted internationally, yet a path exists for decocainized coca flavoring, and the most famous beneficiary is the soda whose name has been winking at the plant since the 19th century.

The soda loophole is the whole absurdity in miniature

Andrew Weil and Davis spend much of the episode trying to pry coca away from cocaine in the public mind. Their basic analogy is brutal and good: coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka. You can abuse the refined product without declaring war on the crop. Nobody sends helicopters over Idaho because a teenager found Smirnoff.

You know, cocoa is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka.

The episode’s anger comes from the gap between how coca is treated when it belongs to Andean people and how it is treated when it belongs to global commerce. For Indigenous communities, Davis describes coca as social glue, sacrament, medicine, labor aid, and a way of speaking to mountains without sounding like a Burning Man grant proposal. For Coca-Cola, it becomes a permitted ingredient stream, stripped of alkaloids, cleaned up for Atlanta’s balance sheet.

This is where the war on drugs looks less like a crusade against chemistry and more like an ugly sorting machine. Sacred leaf in a pouch, criminal suspicion. Secret extract in a soft drink, heritage branding.

Weil’s case for coca is promising, and under-researched

Weil is careful enough to keep the episode from becoming pure plant-gospel. He says coca may help with GI problems, altitude sickness, mood, stamina, appetite, and metabolism, but he also keeps returning to a glaring problem: there isn’t enough modern research. That admission matters. The pitch here is not “trust the leaf, bro.” It is, more persuasively, “why did we spend decades banning this thing before properly studying it?”

For a plant of such enormous historical, cultural, economic scientific medical importance, there is an almost complete absence of research on it.

Weil’s bigger medical point is that a whole plant is not identical to its most famous isolated compound. Coca contains multiple alkaloids, cocaine is only one of them, and he argues that the leaf’s effects are milder, more complex, and potentially useful in ways that purified cocaine is not. That’s plausible. It is also exactly the kind of claim that needs clean trials, not just a great story from the Andes and a very productive anthropologist.

But if this shows potential for preventing or treating type 2 diabetes, you know, that would be enormous

Davis, naturally, goes bigger. He sees coca as a casualty of colonial contempt, drug-war stupidity, and the West’s talent for mistaking its own fear for science. At times he sounds like a man auditioning to be the Lorax for controlled substances. But when he gets to the Coca-Cola exception, the rhetoric has a target you can actually see.

The strongest argument is not that coca is magic

The strongest argument is that our current categories are ridiculous. Coca leaf is scheduled internationally alongside some of the most dangerous drugs in the world, while decocainized coca can apparently help flavor a soda empire. Customs agents can mistake mambé for “green cocaine.” Researchers struggle to obtain legal leaves. Indigenous users inherit the stigma, while the brand gets the nostalgia.

If Davis and Weil want the public to reconsider coca, the Coca-Cola loophole is the perfect battering ram. Not because soda is the scandal. Because soda reveals the rule. The plant was never too dangerous to touch. It was only too dangerous for the wrong people to touch.