TURNS out Scientologists are wrong. Not just about alien souls polluting our bloodstreams. Or even Tom Cruise’s alleged ability to bend the universe to his will. Convincing filmgoers he was 6ft5in ex-Marine hardman Jack Reacher has actually proven that one true.

Rather, it’s the cult’s insistence that “Big Pharma” is society’s biggest legalised purveyor of destructive addiction that sticks in one’s craw.

Equally worthy of such condemnation are the purveyors of fizzy soft drinks, who – despite their reality-distorting enthusiasm for sponsoring Olympic Games and environmental groups under the misnomer of “corporate responsibility” – hawk addictive brews that hook billions on questionable chemical compounds with zero nutritional value.

And Coca-Cola’s “vegetable extract” doesn’t count. Whether that’s a company in-joke referring to the vast profits gained from its customers is for others to decide. So The Herald’s lawyer has informed me anyway.

Yet, the gluttonous consumption of soft drinks will not remain hollow hedonism for much longer – with Coca-Cola now planning to infuse its ubiquitous product with the dioecious, flowering herb known as cannabis.

This astutely places the brand front and centre of a new cultural zeitgeist heralding a clear softening of public perception on the substance.

It also simultaneously carves the company a healthy slice of the burgeoning and highly lucrative legal cannabis marketplace in countries such as Canada and many US states.

Concerns that Coke drinkers will shed their hardened shells of conformist delusion and revert to a natural state of childlike wonder at the magic of existence may be unfounded, however. The multinational conglomerate is highly likely to favour the joyless non-psychoactive cannabidiol extract CBD over its more cosmic cousin THC to develop the drinks.

CBD is a compound which is already freely available in Scotland, and is long proven to ease pain, inflammation, depression, anxiety and symptoms of many life-altering conditions – but lacks THD’s ability to tune users’ brains onto the universe’s subconscious communal wavelength.

“It’s going to be more of a recovery drink,” a source has said. Perhaps from a particularly heavy night on the real thing.

Nothing is real

REMEMBER Coke’s “always the real thing” tagline? Fake news. As we all know, Columbia’s number one export hasn’t been part of Coca-Cola’s secret recipe since 1904. Yet, the truth is actually more complicated – the company does continue to use what is referred to as “decocainised” coca leaf extract.

In the early 1900s, long before its current negotiations with Aurora Cannabis, the Coca-Cola Company set the skyscraping precedent for spicing up soft drinks with illicit chemical goodies by partnering with a firm called Maywood Chemical Works (now the Stepan Company) to import coca leaves which, famously, contained small quantities of the alkaloid found in purified cocaine.

This was soon removed, however. Perhaps the bosses at Coke got paranoid somehow.

Over time, the company’s demand for coca leaves grew so great that new US legislation was actually passed. This had the sole purpose of allowing leaves into the country beyond what was needed for creating cocaine for legitimate medicinal purposes. Yes, legitimate medicinal purposes.

And this is far from an antiquated notion in the USA – with many physicians still using the drug. As an anaesthetic aid, of course.

A four per cent cocaine solution is applied in many rhinoplasty operations (perhaps ironically in cases such as Danniella Westbrook, inset) and as an eyedrop for removing foreign bodies that aren’t Mexican.

For Coca-Cola’s non-medicinal purposes, however, the new coca importing laws specified that alkaloids extracted from these leaves had to be destroyed with US federal officials bearing witness. Rumours that these government officers hit the club afterwards and arrived home three days later for a week-long sleep are entirely false, of course.

Oh sugar sugar

NOW that The Archies’ hit single is firmly implanted in your mind, let us clarify that such catchy chart earbugs are all that can be defined as “pop” – never soft drinks, which are either ginger, juice or jeg.

Both do share very sweet high notes, however, with Coke boasting seven teaspoons of sugar in each can. And not Tate & Lyle’s snow-like innocence either, but something that mankind has branded “high fructose corn syrup” which, again, for legal reasons I will refrain from commenting upon.

Except to say that your granny’s tablet deserved a shelf in Holland & Barrett when set against the outrageous unhealthiness of full fat ginger/juice/jeg.

Renaissance doctor Paracelsus, inset, once said “the dose makes the poison”, meaning that even innocuous substances become dangerous if you eat enough. In recent history, humans have gone from consuming 20 teaspoons of sugar annually to about 150 pounds of the stuff. It’s a hideously destructive substance, especially when consumed in high quantities – and a proven contributor to serious health conditions such as diabetes effecting vital organs like salt on slugs.

But let’s not stop at sugar. Soft drink preservatives like phosphoric acid have been shown to cause bone loss and kidney disease. Citric acid turns your teeth into a vandalised graveyard. And that alluring caramel colouring methylimidazole has also been linked to various cancers in mice during lab tests. Scraping a hardened crust of pigeon droppings onto a digestive biscuit is likely healthier.

Yet it’s not just the contents – plastic and cans used for packaging soft drinks are laden with chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA), a carcinogen suspected of disrupting hormones and raising blood pressure.

If true, the only thing that’s “pop” about soft drinks is the noise an addict’s aorta might make one day.

And finally ...

SPEAKING of cocaine and soft drinks, it was recently discovered that drinking vodka and Red Bull has a very similar effect on the brain as the only type of snow most Californians ever see.

Importantly, however, this discovery was not made down the pub – but in the lab.

In an admirably unnecessary experiment, Professor Richard Van Rijn of Purdue University, Indiana, found that adolescent mice who’d been fed alcohol and caffeine exhibited similar neurological traits to mice given cocaine. Apparently the only way they could tell the difference between the two rodent groups was to see who smoked the most cigarettes.

The discovery also coincides with a new form of radical gene therapy for drug addiction that dampens cocaine cravings using implants of genetically engineered stem cells. These release an enzyme to remove the drug from the bloodstream.

So does this treatment and a less harmful and expensive replacement in vodka and Red Bull spell the end for cocaine? It’s likely we’ll only know when there are far fewer brand new BMWs on our roads.