This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And we love hearing your stories. Send them to Our American Stories.com.

Up next, a story about a drink that we all know, but might not know the backstory of.

Here's our own Monty Montgomery with a story.

Coca-Cola is arguably the South's most successful export.

They sell around 3 billion cases of product around the world annually, but they started out small.

Here's Larry Jorgensen, author of the Coca-Cola Trail, with more on that.

Well, Coca-Cola actually started out as the syrup that is now the main ingredient in Coca-Cola.

And the syrup was invented by John Pemberton, who was a pharmacist in Columbus, Georgia, and had started

working on the formula, and then his time of working on the formula was interrupted by the Civil War,

and he actually fought in the Civil War. When he got out of the war, he had a war injury. You know, stories get twisted

through the years. I heard it was a saber-type injury to his stomach, but whatever, it was

definitely from the war, and he was looking to get some relief. Relief in the form of a morphine-free

painkiller, as he was addicted to the substance at the time.

He had studied and he had learned that the cola nut would create a pretty good flavor,

and the coca leaf was known for giving some relief to pain.

So he developed his formula with those two items in mind, the coca leaf and the cola nut.

Now, the coca leaf, as it was used in producing the Coca-Cola syrup,

was not processed, and I get this all the time, it was not processed in a way that

would produce cocaine.

There was no cocaine in Coca-Cola.

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