Electronic Cigarettes: New Route to Smoking Addiction for Adolescents

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76. They are directly targeting young people.

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/on-parenting/2010/11/23/four-loko-may-be-gone-but-dangerous-alcohol-drinks-remain

The FDA's ban on caffeinated alcohol has been a long time brewing, but an incident in October, when nine students at Central Washington University ended up at the hospital after drinking Four Loko, might have pushed the FDA to act. The drink had 12 percent alcohol in each 23.5-ounce can; by the ounce, that's three times the amount as in a typical beer, and the alcohol equivalent of four glasses of wine. The drink comes in flavors like lemonade and watermelon. So it's no wonder that someone could down several and find himself in serious trouble.

"We're seeing a disturbing trend, in which marketers are targeting these younger drinkers," says Daniel Z. Lieberman, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. "They're doing it with high sugar content. They're doing it with flavors that appeal to young drinkers—fruit punch, raspberry, peach—and they're doing it by making [the drinks] inexpensive."

This isn't the first time that a drink that seems designed for binge drinking has been marketed to young people. The alcohol industry has a long and ignoble history of marketing soda pop-like alcohol drinks that appeal to teens and tweens because they mask the taste of alcohol. Adding caffeine is just the latest wrinkle, inspired by the huge success of Red Bull and other caffeine-laden energy drinks.

Unfortunately, adding caffeine to alcohol doesn't cancel out the ill effects of drinking too much: A caffeinated drunk is just as stupid, and arguably more dangerous, as a drowsy drunk. Students who drank caffeine with alcohol could still react quickly, but they made just as many errors as regular drunks, according to a study from the University of Kentucky. Researchers at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., found that students who mixed caffeine and alcohol were more likely to get injured, get in a car with a drunk driver, or be involved in nonconsensual sex.

[Driving Drowsy as Bad as Driving Drunk]

The campaign against caffeinated alcohol was launched in 2007 by state attorneys general, who are in charge of enforcing state alcohol laws. "We're really concerned about all these products," Jessica Maurer, special assistant to Steve Rowe, Maine's attorney general, told me then. "We think they are potentially dangerous, particularly at a time when every state is seeing incredible binge drinking rates among our youth. Products that promise the ability to keep you up all night so you can party longer [send] absolutely the wrong message."