Cocaine-Tainted Soft Drink Puts Miami Man Into Coma

MIAMI —  A man who drank from a soft drink bottle containing dissolved cocaine was in a coma Saturday, while federal officials discovered two other tainted bottles and checked possible links to Colombian drug smugglers.

Drug traffickers frequently smuggle cocaine by dissolving it in liquids, officials said.

Maximo Rene Menendez, 25, suffered convulsions and cardiac arrest after drinking from a bottle of the Colombian soft drink “Pony Malta de Bavaria” that contained an unknown amount of cocaine, said Jeanne Bush, acting supervisor of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Miami office.

Eight 6.16-ounce bottles of the drink were taken from Menendez’s home in the Miami area, and tests performed at an FDA laboratory in Atlanta found high concentrations of cocaine in two of them.

One bottle contained 54 grams of dissolved cocaine, and the other had nearly 37 grams, the FDA said. The drink is similar to a heavy non-alcoholic beer.

It was not known how much cocaine Menendez had consumed. A spokeswoman for AMI-Kendall Regional Medical Center, where Menendez was in critical condition, said that 25 milligrams would constitute a lethal dose.