By Michelle Minton
How many people follow up a heavy night of drinking with some coffee? How many restaurants serve coffee and desert right after dinners where diners could have been pounding down the vino? How many folks put a little booze in their morning “cup of joe?” How many beer enthusiasts can’t get enough of those coffee stouts or a chocolate porters? All of these things
mix alcohol and caffeine, yet we don’t hear lawmakers calling for these items and practices to be banned by the FDA. What we hear are calls from lawmakers across the country hysterically calling for the ban of alcoholic energy drinks like Four Loko.
Michigan was the first state to outright ban alcoholic energy drink Four Loko. They were followed by Washington on Wednesday when the state’s Liquor Control Board banned all similarly caffeinated malt liquor drinks. A bill to ban the drinks is pending in New Jersey, and a calls for a ban are coming from New York and Oregon as well. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Commission recently asked its licensed sellers to voluntarily stop selling and promoting alcoholic energy drinks. At a city council meeting in Chicago, this week council members proposed a citywide ban of premixed alcoholic caffeinated drinks. This follows the hospitalization of several college students around the nation who reportedly drank the beverage Four Loko and became ill. A few died.
While these incidents are sad, it is no justification for governments to ban the product that most consumers have enjoyed without incident. There is zero scientific evidence that mixing caffeine and alcohol has deleterious effects and in fact there are many decades of evidence to the contrary. It is cheap and easy to drink (for most), which is one reason it is popular among young adults. Young adults are notorious for drinking to access and thus you have Four Loko in the hands of many students going overboard. Politicians are all too happy to use the demonization of a product as a quick and easy way to improve their approval ratings, but banning a product “for our own good” based purely on hysteria is a dangerous precedent to set.
Like it or hate it Four Loko ought to be defended right alongside the individual’s right to choose what he or she drinks and how much. If we let the government ban a product because it could potentially be abused, that opens the way for a limitless number of product bans “for our own good.” Personally, I think my interest is served best when I determine what’s good for me rather than self-righteous busybodies and power-hunger bureaucrats.
I am a college student myself and I know that no matter what students are drinking some of them just dont know when to say enough is enough. This of course results in alcohol poisoning, people ignore those that have already "passed out" and in all reality they have slipped into a comatose state from the high alcohol content in their bloodstream. The depressant effects of alcohol can cause breathing to stop after passing out, and this is how people die. Granted, Four Loko's are an energy beer with a high alcohol content, but it matters not if your drinking Fours or Everclear- alcohol is alcohol and it has the same effect no matter if caffine is present or not. I'm a lightweight- two dollars for one beer gets me feelin pretty good- but not to the point I'm falling on the floor hitting on every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the room. I know when to say no, so I will not poison myself with the Fours that I drink. Many times I have studied and done homework late into the night under the effects of Four Loko, and guess what- I am still a 3.85 GPA student. To ban the Loko's because a few idiots that don't know their own limits got sick and died is wrong on many levels- we have the choice as to drink or not to drink. We know our bodies and should be able to stop when we've reached the desired level of inebriation- not my fault some people ignore their own bodies and insist on drinking beyond their own limits. By the way- I just wrote this post after consuming a whole can, and yet- I still make sense and pay attention to my grammar and punctuation. My goodness- perhaps Four Loko isn't as evil as the lobbyists in congress would have us believe. Banning a drink is not going to stop stupid people from doing stupid things, it's simply a manner of controlling us as they always try to do. What ever happened to the freedoms we used to have? I want to choose what I can drink and to hell with the political bastards that want to ban my favorite beer. I have said my piece- Thank you.