College students all over the country have gone crazy over Four Loko, an alcoholic energy drink that has earned the nickname “blackout in a can.” With a 12 percent alcohol content, the drink is the equivalent of ingesting four beers and two cups of coffee, all packed into one can.
But after an incident at Central Washington University that led to the hospitalization of nine students who had been drinking the beverage, many colleges are looking into banning Four Loko and the Food and Drug Administration is investigating its safety.
It should not come as a surprise that mixing a stimulant with a depressant in large quantities is going to have unhealthy consequences. Doing so is essentially sending mixed signals to your body, asking it to both speed up and slow down simultaneously.
Four Loko’s good taste, colorful package and low cost are deceptive, making it seem far more harmless than it actually is. It is unnatural for things that are as bad for you as Four Loko to taste so appealing. There is a reason that people don’t generally chug bottles of vodka, and it’s a good one. However, people should be able to look past that to see the health risk that Four Loko poses.
Colleges such as CWU are justified in their decision to ban the beverage. Although students will undoubtedly be angry, banning the drink is only in their own best interests. Although the case could be made that all alcoholic beverages can be dangerous when consumed in large quantities, few drinks pose such a serious health risk, and few are so widely popular among college students.
If the FDA’s investigations confirm the risks associated with the drink, it should be pulled from the shelves altogether. For a company to continue marketing a product that has been proven to be extremely dangerous is both irresponsible and wrong.
At the same time, people should have enough common sense to know their limits. While the FDA goes through the long process of debating the safety of alcoholic energy drinks, students should be careful about how much of beverages such as Four Loko that they consume.
Although it may be more appealing than some other drinks, Four Loko presents a serious risk, especially when consumed in excess. So for now, stick to beer. It may not be as delicious, but at least it is easier to judge how much you can handle.
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