but the key was the combination of alcohol and cocaine, which worked as well in the South as it had in Europe and the North. Success did not last. The problem wasn’t cocaine, but alcohol. Atlanta banned alcohol sales in saloons in 1885, and Pemberton saw the writing on the wall. He changed his formula.76 The new formula emphasized sugar (a lot of sugar), caffeine (a lot of caffeine), and only small amounts of cocaine, a drug that would commandeer the name coke in popular language later in the twentieth century. Pemberton marketed Coca-Cola as a temperance drink.
