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Caffeinated Alcoholic Drinks May Be Illegal
Anonymusing writes "The FDA has announced an investigation into the safety and legality of alcoholic beverages containing caffeine. As a Wall Street Journal blog reports, two major beer companies, MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch, stopped producing caffeinated alcoholic drinks last year after reports surfaced of increased negative effects compared to caffeine-free alcohol. CNN notes that, according to FDA rules, 'food additives require premarket approval based on data demonstrating safety submitted to the agency' — and caffeine is a food additive. The 26 targeted beverage makers have 30 days to respond."
Point-of-sale mixed drinks are specifically excluded. It's kind of arbitrary, yeah, but the FDA doesn't really have jurisdiction over that kind of thing. State and local health departments do, of course, and I can see some overzealous crusader trying to make a name for himself that way, but trying to get rid of classic caffeine-and-alcohol combinations like Irish coffee or rum and Coke would probably create too much of a backlash.
Hmmm, I wonder about chocolate and coffee liqueurs? I can't see them banning Kahlua any time soon, either.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Or will they start monitoring in stores now that you wont buy vodka and red bull at the same time?
It's also interesting that alcohol is being kept legal while it has a lot more health issues than like cannabis, like heart disease, dementia, cancer, alcoholism, diabetes, strokes and then the usual ones like hangover and weight problems. It seems it should be other way around.
That being said, I prefer good vodka (Russian Standard Vodka) over beer any day. Usually the best mix is just some smashed ice and lime. I used to mix with red bull, but it tastes like shit now.
The USA tried banning alcohol once, but it didn't work out too well.
At least we got cool bar names like "The 21st Amendment" out of it.
Functional programming... for real men!
Unless we're talking about spanish coffees, alcoholic coffee drinks often have a lot less liquor than the drinks they are talking about. A shot of vodka in a 6 oz. red bull has tremendous side effects for a lot of people.
My own informal research done in bars among friends who enjoy drinks like this, heart palpitations aren't unusual after a few vodka/redbulls or jager bombs. Mixing a moderate stimulant with a strong depressant just spells disaster.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Soon, we'll be smoking weed in a bar wondering how we can score some Jack & Coke.
There's a pretty huge problem with banning alcoholic beverages containing caffeine. The worst offenders are not drinks that come in a can from Coors, but mixed drinks, like Vodka Red-Bull's. You can make laws telling people not to mix their Vodka and Red Bulls together, but good luck enforcing them! (Honestly, you'd think common sense and a sense of taste would be enough...)
The truly awful thing is that, if this kind of law was enacted, the drinks it would actually kill would be wonderful, rich microbrew espresso stouts and imperial coffee stouts. Outlaw Coors Light if you must, but DO NOT FUCK WITH GOOD BEER.
Finally, the most damning argument against this sort of law of all is that stupid frat boys and girls will still wind up doing stupid things no matter what they're drinking. So what's the point eh?
We tried banning cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and a laundry list of other drugs as well. It hasn't worked out any better.
We tried banning cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and a laundry list of other drugs as well
I don't know about cocaine or heroin, but I am all for banning the eating of other people, AND banning me having to do laundry.
(lame joke quota: filled... for now...)
I found the comment at the end of this article very telling (even if it is about Australia, not the U.S.):
"Dealers often advertise this drug as being like ecstasy but its properties are much more similar to cocaine and amphetamines," said Professor Iain McGregor, director of Sydney University's Psychopharmacology Laboratory. "Users get feelings of euphoria, it's dancey, it's happy, a bit trippy.
"Unfortunately for people like myself and Paul (Dillon), who are here to tell people drugs are bad, there doesn't appear to be a whole lot that is bad about it."
You heard it here first, folks. It's 'unfortunate' for the regulators when there "doesn't appear to be a whole lot that is bad about" a mood altering substance.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
How long has this been around? Probably as long as coke. So now they think it should be made illegal. Idiots.
No, sorry, the summary is really short on vital information. Rum'n'cokes are not on trial here. There is a standard called GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) that can be met, and rum'n'cokes fit this standard. And no one "thinks they should be illegal" - this is an announcement of a start of an investigation, not an announcement of a new law. That investigation MAY lead to a law, but it may not.
These are NOT rum'n'cokes they are talking about. "Sparks" (a Miller/Coors product), one of the products that is being reformulated, had as much alcohol as a can of beer but as much caffeine as a "stay awake" pill. The proportion of alcohol to caffeine is the issue. Think "rum'n'coke with a 'no-doz' pill chaser". Have a half-dozen of them and the caffeine will have you so hyped up you'll feel normal, or damned near it. A half a dozen rum'n'cokes would put you under the table - a half dozen of these little beauties would have you driving through the front door of the bar into the table while convinced that was your garage. Your coordination and function is shot to shit but you have enough energy to feel normal.
This is largely the same risk as people mixing Red Bull with alcohol, except in this case breweries are setting the proportions. You can't regulate stupid - college kids will always do stupid things like this - but at issue here is whether to ask companies to refrain from making this proportion intentionally. Faced with the evidence in the investigation, several manufacturers have voluntarily (as in, not under coercion from the Government) discontinued this class of caffeinated alcoholic beverages because of the possibility of accidental abuse due to the fact that the caffeine-to-alcohol ratio in these beverages tends to conceal the effects of the alcohol.
I'm not totally in favor of laws like this, but this isn't a law. At least not yet. It's an investigation that may or may not lead to a law. At that point, I'm still not sure about a law, but at least the risks would be identified and documented. Then manufacturers would probably just pull the product based on the information given before a law was even passed (and some of them already did!).
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I am all for banning the eating of other people.
Really I think its a waste of perfectly good food to not to eat people. Think of how many starving people 1 fat person would feed. It is like recycling food.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Less than one.
Potential disaster or not, as long as people are making an informed and deliberate choice I fail to see the need for government action.
Possibly because the informed part is often missing.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I'm not condoning the use of an untested drug with unknown side effects. There's no way in hell I'd try this new compound until it had a long track record and the full effects were well known. Of course, since it makes people happy, that will probably never happen in a clinical trial because it will be banned to appease puritans.
What I was doing was strongly condemning the attitude of a publicly funded scientist who seems to believe that it is his duty to paint recreational drug use as a bad thing regardless of whether or not it is genuinely harmful.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I assure you, Jager and Redbull can come to no good end.
Though I don't think it's any business of the FDA.
Is it too much to ask for a society that lets people make their own mistakes? Must we be hemmed in by the moral and ethical mistakes of the stupidest amongst us? How long must the law protect us from ourselves? Have you as a public been fooled into thinking I'm unaware of the dangers of smoking, carousing, and general debauchery? I assure I'm well aware, and I don't care. Please stop making thing illegal for my own good. I'm old enough to choose to make my own mistakes. As should you be.
7% use illegal drugs (White House), and that includes marijuana.
yeah, so consider the source. A recent survey here in NH found 11% freely admitting to pollsters that they smoke weed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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We tried banning cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and a laundry list of other drugs as well. It hasn't worked out any better.
That's simply not true. It's provided tremendous revenue for black ops government entities that don't officially exist, has kept the military industrial complex well fed, the US at a constant state of 'war' and provided cover for a creeping police state.
It's worked out tremendously (unless you care about quaint things like rule-of-law).
My God, it's Full of Source!
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I was once involved in a golden shower with Bazooka Joe.
So you've forced some people not to use a harmless substance at what cost? Billions of dollars wasted. Thousands killed by gangs and cartels. Millions of fellow citizens locked up and living off of your money. Countless violations of constitutional rights in order to enforce the pointless bans.
Prohibition is a disgrace and you've got to be either an idiot, or making money off it to argue otherwise.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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According to some studies over in europe, after pot was made 'legal', usage went down, so it may in fact increase usage. It's certain that banning alcohol made the related problems way worse, so it's reasonable to expect the same for pot. Also, teenagers have an easier time getting pot compared to booze, so that's what they do.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I'm not going to argue the "kinda out of it for a month" claim but I challenge you to produce the results of any study that backs up your claim that isn't countered by double the number of studies that find exactly the opposite, but your claim that you're "ok maybe two or three days later" is ridiculous. Brain damage, cirrhosis, heart disease are some permanent problems just to name a few, and if that's not good enough for you, you can die by drinking it quickly enough.
Go try to die or have any permanent effect by smoking as much pot as you possibly can as fast as you can. Unless you have asthma or a very bad heart or something, you will fail, every time. Use a vaporizer, a gravity bong, it doesn't matter, you just can't do it. I'm not even sure you could permanently hurt yourself if you ate a pound of the stuff. In studies, the lethal to effective dose ratio from animal studies, I've seen numbers anywhere from 250:1 to 40,000:1. Even for really really good weed, where you would feel something off half of a normal-sized hit, and using the 250:1 statistic which is frankly so far outside what every other study I've seen that it should hardly be considered, you'd have to take 125 hits to die. All I have to say is, go try to take 125 hits of weed good enough to get you stoned of half a hit. Just try, try as hard as you can.
On second thought, I will argue against your "out of it for a month" claim, because it's just so ridiculous. No drug lasts for a month, that's just silly. If you did try it, and you felt out of it for a month, you either smoked something laced with an exotic research chemical (you didn't), or I'm afraid it was nothing but your overactive imagination at work.
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Correlation is not causation! Wake up!!
Gee, thank you sir for debunking the "non scientific" study you fail to quote with - your gut feeling. I am enlightened.
On the other hand, as a doctor I can tell you that caffeine and taurine belong to the group of drugs called xanthines, whose pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic effects are very well known. Alcohol has also been studied intensively, to such a point where we know its myriad effects on the human body on a molecular level.
Now while we haven't actually asked for volunteers to submit themselves to studies where we try to kill them with a combination of xanthines and ethanol, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the effects of both classes of drugs and see potential problems, especially in the areas of cardiac dysrhythmias, electrolyte imbalances, the dehydrating effect of both drugs, and the psychoactive effects of both drugs.
But I know that since you are incredibly wise, you have considered all the studies involved in all of the above, and have a pointed argument backed by clinically controlled trials to lay the foundation of your claims.
Correlation isn't causation, but do realize that when you have an avian that floats on water and quacks, you are probably observing a duck.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You consider the White House to be a valid source on illegal drug use stats? That sounds about as valid as a study from Mr. Kalashnikov showing that AK47s are the best machine guns available. I'd trust numbers from the DEA before the White House - they're just enforcing the policies, not trying to shove their importance down everyone's throats.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but I'd guess it's closer to 20-30% around here. If you were to look only at people between 17-25, it's probably 60%+.
Of course, it also depends how you quantify "use". Daily? Once a week? A month? A year? Ever?
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I agree. It has worked awesome. At only the cost of a billions on dollars, literally hundreds of thousands of deaths, the funding of black markets, and the countless ruined lives for minor drug offenses, we have done a great job making it so that only about 10% of the population is criminal at any one time for using a basically harmless drug that ranks below caffeine and alcohol in terms of side effectives. Mission accomplished! We are winning the war on drugs!
I drink coffee in the morning to get rid of the last effects of alcohol the evening before, and drink alcohol in the evening to get rid of the last effects of the coffee in the morning....
There's a large number of people here (myself included) that wouldn't know where to find drugs if they wanted them this week.
That's just because you don't want any this week. If you did, you'd know.
I don't want any this week, either, but I know someone who would know, if I did want any.
See, I don't think we've done anything, because the simple fact of the matter is that most people don't actually want to do anything harder than pot (which is why we should legalize it). I've never liked pot, but I've experimented considerably beyond that, and you know what? Drugs suck. I don't think they should be illegal, but I also don't think we are really reducing users any, because the vast majority of people who try them don't keep doing them.
Alcohol, for all its ills, is very easy to use and very easy to dose correctly. Mistakes still happen, but the truth of the matter is that doing a little of it feels good, and then it starts feeling bad and worse and worse the more you do. There is a very large swath of dosage of that drug that is just plain unpleasant, and that is usually enough to keep people from hurting themselves on it. Even so, people--usually novice users of it--sometimes go too far. No matter though, because when that happens, you just take them to the hospital and get their stomach pumped.
I say "no matter" because when you decide to do that, you're not deciding to go to jail after the hospital. And that is am important difference between legal drugs and illegal drugs.
Now, there are some people for whom the unpleasantness of drunkenness is not dissuasive. They will keep using until they are addicted. The same is true with any other drug you can think of--some people can't or won't control themselves, and you can't stop them from destroying their lives with substances. They are weak people, even when they are our friends and family members, and they get what they deserve.
Maybe it's in their character; maybe it's in their genes, but they are going to die in a gutter whether drugs are illegal or not.
So why do all of us have to have our rights trampled and lose our sovereignty over what we do with our own bodies just to vainly try to save degenerates who are not long for this world and are only trivially affected by these laws?
You, Mr. Freeman, have obviously not tried enough drugs or been around enough users to have any idea what you're talking about.
So I read the article about the reports of negative effects. They surveyed college students, and a result (for example) was that students who mixed energy drinks and alcohol were more likely to ride with a drunk driver. Or put another way, students who rode with a drunk driver were more likely to mix energy drinks and alcohol. Maybe riding with a drunk driver gives a person cravings for energy drinks mixed with alcohol. Or maybe People who are stupid or have poor regard for their own health and safety are likely to make multiple bad decisions, like riding with a drunk driver and mixing energy drinks and alcohol.
I'm not saying mixing energy drinks and alcohol is not bad, I'm sure it is, I'm just saying the study may be flawed.
Of course it's his job. Here in the UK, the government's scientific advisor on drugs was foolish enough to advise based on the actual science. He got sacked as a result.
I've heard LSD called the drug that keeps on giving. So even if the drug itself is no longer in your system, there could be mental effects for a month after.
I can't comment on natural marijuana, but I did take synthetic THC (Marinol) during chemotherapy. I wasn't getting much effect from single-pill doses, so one night I tried two pills spaced two hours apart (which was still well within the prescribed dosage). A couple hours later I was hit with unpleasant hallucinations and distortions of time (my blog entry). My body returned to normal overnight, but my brain was well scrambled for at least a week.
So I don't think it's crazy to say some drugs could have an effect for longer than they're measurable in the bloodstream. I'd like to see more scientific studies of many drugs and legalization of those that can be used with reasonable safety. Maybe natural marijuana would have been a better treatment for my chemotherapy side effects, but unfortunately in my district it's still thoroughly illegal.
Not only is it physically addictive, it's also one of the few substances who's withdrawal symptoms can kill you.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Cocaine is, in fact, the only local I know of that can be used in the eye. Go ask an eye surgeon how much cocaine they use in a month. It'll be a non-trivial amount, and absurdly pure, but unfortunately also metered to an extraordinary fineness, and covered with seals and signatures ten ways to Sunday.
There's actually a chemical plant in New Jersey that provides all of the US G'vmt's legal cocaine supply. They give the post-processed leaves to Coca-Cola for extraction of the infamous non-active ingredients afterwords. It's a fun research topic.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
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