FDA Cracks Down on Caffeine-Charged Alcoholic Drinks

Alex Kingsbury

Four Loko announced that it was dropping caffeine from its alcoholic drinks

The human body has a barometer to tell the brain when it has consumed too much alcohol. After one too many, speech is slurred, the head aches, and the body becomes drowsy and gets wobbly on its feet.

But caffeine can mask those sensory clues that usually stop drinkers.

And now the Food and Drug Administration has declared it an illegal and "unsafe food additive" in a specific type of alcoholic beverage. The decision, which comes after a yearlong review of the issue, was accompanied by warning letters sent last week to four makers of caffeinated alcoholic drinks with names like "Four Loko," "Moonshot," and "Joose." The drinks vary in potency, but some contain the equivalent of several beers and multiple cups of coffee in a single can. To put that in perspective: a single $2.50 can of Four Loko, if consumed within an hour, will likely make an average 200-pound man too intoxicated to legally drive a car. That's one reason this particular drink has earned the sobriquet "blackout in a can."

The federal crackdown follows several state-level efforts to limit the sale and marketing of the increasingly popular beverages, which government officials contend are marketed toward the young. In 2008, 13 state attorneys general began investigations into the drinks; and Utah, Oklahoma, Washington state, and Michigan have already banned their sale. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House office of drug control policy, commended the FDA move this month saying that the drinks are "designed, branded, and promoted to encourage binge drinking."

The brewers, for their part, responded quickly to the expected move by the FDA. Even before the announcement was made last week, Phusion Projects, which makes Four Loko, announced that it was dropping caffeine and other stimulative ingredients from its alcoholic drinks. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, a leading proponent of the ban, said that the ruling "should be the nail in the coffin of these dangerous and toxic drinks."

But the ban will only impact a limited, if growing, sector of the spirits market. As the Four Loko makers noted in a recent statement, if the combination of alcohol and caffeine was unsafe, then "popular drinks like rum and colas or Irish coffees that have been consumed safely and responsibly for years would face the same scrutiny that our products have recently faced."

Critics of the drinks point to research that suggests that the culture of consumption of these particular drinks is particularly alarming from a public health perspective. For instance, a study by the Academy of Emergency Medicine found that "drinkers who consume alcohol with energy drinks are about twice as likely as drinkers who do not report mixing alcohol with energy drinks to report being taken advantage of sexually, to report taking advantage of someone else sexually, and to report riding with a driver who was under the influence of alcohol." But that study didn't just focus on caffeinated alcoholic beverages, it also focused on the mixing of spirits like vodka with energy drinks like Red Bull. Even under the FDA ruling, ordering such concoctions at a bar remains legal.

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Health - The FDA Cracks Down on Caffeine-Charged Alcoholic Drinks