US Suit Against Coke For Marketing Caffeine To Kids : Indymedia Colombia

In "For God, Country and Coca-Cola," in a prodigious account very well-reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times Book Review, business journalist Mark Pendergrast, described the suit brought at the urging of Harvey Wiley, known as the father of the Food and Drug Act of 1906:

"His anguished memos make it clear that his main concern was that children drank Coca-Cola. In May, he tried again, writing that a woman on a local board had objected to Coca-Cola signs erected near schools, luring students to imbibe. 'If their parents knew they were drinking caffeine,' Wiley asserted, 'they would be horrified.'... This time, James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture, personally told Wiley to lay off Coca-Cola. Wiley was 'surprised and grieved,' he wrote later, but 'as usual I could see behind it the manipulation of powerful hands.'

In August of 1909, John Candler could still boast that 'not once... has there been a single State or Federal prosecution against ... Coca-Cola.' But two months later, that all changed.
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The case was officially called The United States vs. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola.... ***

From opening day on March 13, 1911, the Barrels and Kegs trial attracted national attention. ***

Coca-Cola eventually won the case, though not on any scientific grounds. All the testimony and spying on jurors proved irrelevant...."

The most compelling case against the drink in the trial had been its consumption by children. Defense lawyers hadn't contested caffeine's bad effects on youngsters; instead, they had denied that children drank Coca-Cola at all. This assertion was somewhat awkward, since many contemporary ads showed children drinking right along with their parents. "Father likes it. Son likes it," crowed one 1907 ad which depicted a five-year old happily imbibing. After 1911, an unwritten law stated that no one under twelve years old would be shown drinking in a Coca-Cola ad -- a dictum enforced under 1986."

Because of adverse publicity from the trial, two bills were introduced to the U.S House in 1912 to amend the Pure Food and Drugs Act, adding caffeine to the list of 'habit-forming' and 'deleterious' substances which must be listed on the label. Coca-Cola successfully fought to kill the bills, the first of many such efforts to keep its caffeine content out of the public eye.

In the final event, the case was settled out of court on November 12, 1917. Coca-Cola consented to a plea of 'no contest,' allowing the government a technical victory. ...

Wiley was no longer at the Bureau to push the issue and everyone was sick of the case by this time, eight years after the initial seizure. In later years, however, Howard Candler implied that a federal attorney had accepted a bribe in return for the settlement.
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As [Coca-Cola counsel] Harold Hirsch later wrote, 'It was a serious litigation and involved the possibility of the entire destruction of the company's business. In essence, Hirsch had won a major victory: Coca-Cola had survived." (pp. 117-124)

Pendergrast's book was published by Collier Books of the MacMillan Publishing Company.

Another prodigious and well-researched account is titled SECRET FORMULA, by Frederick Allen.