Mixed messages

Not too long ago, I noted here the backlash against "Four Loko" -- a malt beverage containing a lot of caffeine.  I lampooned the idea that this combination is particularly pernicious.  But today the Food and Drug Administration of the United States federal government saw fit to intervene in this space, basically banning the malt-beverage-energy-drink category.

As I read through the story of this administrative action in the New York Times online, I couldn't help thinking back to another story I read in the New York Times recently:  a story about coffee-based cocktails.  Although the author of that piece noted the controversy surrounding Four Loko (et al.), there was no sense of the moral panic that for some reason surrounds the spiked energy drinks. 

How to explain this discrepancy?  I'm sticking with that old standby:  hysteria.

Caffeine + Alcohol = MADNESS!

Powers that be are moving to ban beverages like "Four Loko" that combine the alcoholic content of wine with the caffeine content of coffee.  The problem, supposedly, is that the caffeine interferes with that well-known natural effect of alcohol on young adults:  sleepiness.  Worse, the beverages may be "explicitly designed to attract under-age drinkers," what with their "colorful packaging and flavors like watermelon, blue raspberry and lemon-lime."   Consider the case of one student at Ramapo College, who was hospitalized after "drinking three cans of Four Loko and several shots of tequila in just over an hour."  Presumably, were it not for the caffeine in those three cans of Four Loko, the helpless student would simply have fallen asleep before he had the chance to drink those "several shots of Tequila."  These beverages are a menace.