Quote:
Originally Posted by nath
What really bothers me in all of this isn't the "oh, think of the children" argument; it's that there are perfectly good drugs out there already to create the effects these kids are looking for, whose effects positive and negative have been proven over time, without having to resort to dangerous new chemical combinations.
I think you're really buying into the hype here. There probably isn't any reason to panic at all about this stuff but kids will be kids etc.
It's not a huge amount of alcohol or caffeine, I haven't seen any scientific studies on this, lots of kids will placebo effect this stuff and exaggerate the effects because getting ****ed up is awesome!! and since 18-21 year olds getting alcohol poisoning is so very, very uncommon it must be Four Loko etc.
FWIW the FDA has kind of limited power. The reason mixed drinks in bars etc aren't banned is because they can't be, and they can't ban anything in this case but adding caffeine directly to these drinks. They can't even ban pre-packaged coffee/alcohol mixtures.
The problem is essentially that the stuff is popular among young drinkers. Even if it was possible to ban Irish Coffee, I doubt they would. But they'll ban whatever new type of drink is popular among 19yo even if it's essentially the same thing what the 35yo drink, but 35 yo tend not to binge drink.