The following is an excerpt from p. 104-106 of Chapter 2, “Sugar is the Knife: The World’s Favorite Drug” from my new book, Drugism (2022):
[Note: due to unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to share this excerpt yesterday as usually scheduled. To my regular readers and subscribers, thank you for your patience.]
The US president with the deepest ties to sugar was probably Richard Nixon. It is in Nixon’s administration that we see most clearly the codependent relationship between the sugar industry and the US federal government.
As veteran journalist John Ketwig writes, “Nixon’s career was aided, funded, and abetted by Pepsi Cola from the beginning.”[i] This alliance largely revolved around Nixon’s relationship with Don Kendall, the president of Pepsi Cola. Kendall and Nixon collaborated closely for years, during Nixon’s term as Vice President under Dwight Eisenhower, through his own presidency, and afterward.
As Vice President under President Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon participated in the “kitchen debate,” a diplomatic publicity stunt still taught in high school classes today. The “debate” was between Nixon and Russian Chairman Nikita Krushchev, and the year was 1959. It was the height of the Cold War and US-Russian relations were quite tense. The debate is remembered as a successful conversation between Nixon and Krushchev.
In truth, according to Ketwig, “the entire event had been planned and scripted as a Pepsi Cola publicity stunt,” written by William Saffire, a Pepsi employee who later became a speechwriter for the White House and a New York Times staff member.[ii] There was even a large, clearly visible Pepsi logo displayed in the mock kitchen in which the debate was held.
The following year, Nixon ran as the Republican presidential candidate against John F. Kennedy. After he lost, Nixon met with Kendal and another close colleague of theirs, Elmer Bobst. Bobst was the chairman of a pharmaceutical company and was also part of a law firm in New York City. The three of them devised a plan. Bobst’s law firm agreed to hire Nixon and, in exchange, handle the legal business of Pepsi Cola, as well as the pharmaceutical company which Bobst already chaired.
The result would be a private sector powerhouse: a New York City legal team featuring a former Vice President handling all the legal business of a soda company and a drug company. It was a true product of capitalism. The law firm, until then known as Mudge Stern Baldwin and Todd, was rebranded as Nixon Mudge Rose Guthrie and Alexander.
Nixon and Kendal also counted among their friends Cartha “Deke” Deloach.[iii] DeLoach was J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant at the FBI, and worked with the Bureau for 28 years. His retirement from the FBI occurred during Nixon’s presidency. In 1970, DeLoach became vice president of Pepsi Cola, a post he held for fifteen years. When offered the position of FBI director after Hoover’s death in 1972, DeLoach purportedly turned down the offer because he would have made less money than he was making at the time from Pepsi.[iv] That the FBI competed for personnel with a soda company is stark evidence of the immense influence sugar and processed foods hold in our own government.
The whole thing is reminiscent of the Qing dynasty salt merchants of China, who upon doing exceptionally well in the salt business, were awarded with official imperial positions. The revolving door between legal drug dealers and government office is an old phenomenon.
Nixon, Kendall, DeLoach, et al may even have been aware of these parallels themselves. During Nixon’s presidency, his visit to China saw the introduction of Pepsi Cola and its affiliate Pizza Hut into the People’s Republic. They were among the first US companies to do business with China since its revolution in 1949.
Let it not go unnoticed that Nixon was the very same president who oversaw the passage of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The CSA is the garbage legislation that divides drugs into “schedules” and which has been governing drug politics in the US (and abroad) since 1970 (the same year DeLoach moved from the FBI to Pepsi Cola). It is no accident that the president who introduced the CSA was the very same who had the deepest ties to the sugar industry. Refined sugar is itself a powerful and potentially lethal drug, yet it does not appear anywhere in the CSA.
The close alliance between sugar merchants and the federal government has continued into the twenty-first century. In 2004, the CEO of the cookie and cereal monolith Kellogg’s, Carlos Guiterrez, stepped down. Why? He had been offered the position of Secretary of Commerce by the George W. Bush administration.[v]
In all of this, we see the utter dominance of sugar in US policy and bloodstreams. When studied from this perspective, it is no mystery why the diabetes epidemic is as big as it is today. The sugar pushers have influenced the government, indeed, been part of the government, since the birth of the United States. Sugar, it seems, is the nation’s drug of choice.
Endnotes
[i] Ketwig, 20.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Hufford, “Cartha ‘Deke’ DeLoach.”
[v] Moss, 89.
Sources
Hufford, Bob. “Cartha ‘Deke’ DeLoach.” Find A Grave, Mar 15, 2013. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/106735455/cartha-deloach
Ketwig, John. Nixon and Pepsi. The Veteran, 44(2):20, Fall 2014.
Moss, Michael. Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Random House, 2013. New York, NY.
#drugism #drugs #drug #sugar #cola #politics #history