Alcoholic Energy Drinks/Four Loko

Image by Troy Holden via Flickr

There is a new drink rapidly gaining popularity, it’s called Four Loko. You may or may not have heard of it. Well it’s on the brink of being banned since a few kids are dropping after drinking it. It has a mix of alcohol and caffeine, which is canceling out the alcohol feelings. They drink more and pass out, get alcohol poisoning, and have died from it or car wrecks. This has led a few people to call for banning this drink. Here’s the links, here and here.
Side effects aside, I see no reason for this. People have mixed caffeine and booze for years. Jack and Coke, Jaegermeister and Red Bull. It’s not the drink, it’s the dumb-asses drinking so much of it. Kids and young adults decision-making processes generally lie in the amygdala, the lizard brain. As you get older it moves to the pre-frontal cortex where logic lies. At least according to a Parade article I read this Sunday. Experience is a strict teacher whose lessons are lasting and occasionally painful. That leaves a mark no matter where you process your decision-making.
By banning this drink, it’s just another bar in the cage of security over freedom. People have so many safety nets to catch them and laws to regulate their decision-making, society has become weak and stupid. When people are accountable for their own actions, they learn, through trial and error and get stronger and smarter. I don’t think popular opinion should be forged into a chain used to tie down a whole society because of a few idiots. You either learn or you pay the consequences. That’s survival of the fittest.  So instead of taking something from everyone because of a few people’s bad choices, you instead work on reversing the dumbing down of society.

Your thoughts on Four Loko?

Related Articles

• Mad about Four Loko (hotair.com)
• The Case Against Banning Four Loko (dailyfinance.com)