The FDA: Federal Doofus Association

[Crazed Rabbit]

The FDA, or Food and Drug Administration, is likely going to rule tomorrow that caffeine can't be added to alcoholic drinks, because it's an "unsafe food additive"

Yes, an unelected committee has decided to make it illegal to add caffeine and alcohol, both legal to consume, in the same container and sell them.

Shamefully some government agency in my state passed an "emergency ban" on certain alcohol and caffeine drinks.

Observe, ye all, the stupidity of government coupled with the desire for control over your diet.

The FDA should be stripped of all legally binding power.

CR

[Lemur]

But ... but where will I get my Baileys Irish Creme?

[miotas]

No more rum & coke in the USA? What's wrong with your country?!!!!

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Shouldn't you address the claimed health risks?

It doesn't have anything to do with diet (poor straw man). The claim is that it leads to alcohol poisoning by masking the effects so that people can't judge how intoxicated they are.

No more rum & coke in the USA? What's wrong with your country?!!!!

Q11. What's the difference between a drink that combines alcohol and cola and a beverage that contains alcohol and caffeine?

A11. Cola is a carbonated beverage made up of many ingredients, including caffeine.The addition of caffeine to cola-type beverages up to certain levels is GRAS. Consumers may themselves choose to add cola to alcoholic beverages according to their preferences. The beverages that are the subject of FDA's request for information are characterized by the intentional addition of caffeine to alcoholic beverages by the manufacturer.

Four energy drink is available in eight flavors: Grape, Fruit Punch, Orange Blend, Watermelon, Blue Raspberry, Lemon Lime, Lemonade, and Cranberry Lemonade. ...


In its US market, Phusion Projects added a 23.5oz (695ml) beverage named Four Loko to its Four product line subsequent to the launch of Four Maxed. Four Loko contains 12.0% ABV. I

[Crazed Rabbit]

Shouldn't you address the claimed health risks?

It doesn't have anything to do with diet (poor straw man).

Your diet is what you eat and drink. So I do think it relates.

The claim is that it leads to alcohol poisoning by masking the effects so that people can't judge how intoxicated they are.

It's easy to have an idea of how drunk you are by keeping track of how much you drink. What, we can't count and have to determine our sobriety using self-applied intoxication tests?

The government has no place deciding how we should be drinking. Just because its possible to overindulge is no excuse for a nationwide ban.

Q11. What's the difference between a drink that combines alcohol and cola and a beverage that contains alcohol and caffeine?

A11. Cola is a carbonated beverage made up of many ingredients, including caffeine.The addition of caffeine to cola-type beverages up to certain levels is GRAS. Consumers may themselves choose to add cola to alcoholic beverages according to their preferences. The beverages that are the subject of FDA's request for information are characterized by the intentional addition of caffeine to alcoholic beverages by the manufacturer.

And consumers can't choose whether or not to buy beverages that contain alcohol and caffeine like they choose to mix drinks themselves? There is no real difference, a fact that 'answer' neatly ignores.

CR

[gaelic cowboy]

12% alcohol by volume

There is your problemo

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Your diet is what you eat and drink. So I do think it relates.

Hardly

It's like the outcry over the banning of trans fat. "the government is trying to ban tasty food!". But actually they are banning an industrial product that is used because it's cheap and convenient not because it tastes better.

This is not about banning foods because of the taste or because the government thinks its business is to intervene in peoples diets. It's genuinely about the alcohol poisoning issue.

It's easy to have an idea of how drunk you are by keeping track of how much you drink. What, we can't count and have to determine our sobriety using self-applied intoxication tests?

A second issue is people thinking they can drive. But the main issue is that the products are deemed deceptive. That's what you're skipping.

The government has no place deciding how we should be drinking. Just because its possible to overindulge is no excuse for a nationwide ban.

No age limit either? And it isn't about overindulging.

And consumers can't choose whether or not to buy beverages that contain alcohol and caffeine like they choose to mix drinks themselves? There is no real difference, a fact that 'answer' neatly ignores.

CR

If you acknowledge that consumers can mix the drinks themselves then what was all that about "the government deciding how we drink". They are only deciding what we can buy conveniently prepackaged.

I have actually not even examined the science behind the risk claims. It could all be a scare. I thought you had information to that point actually.


More generally though, I think you do a disservice to the true spirit of wanting to be free from government interference when you use this kind of rhetoric in defense of 24 ounce blue raspberry 12.0% abv energy drinks...if they are wrong then it is purely for the principle and the slippery slope nature.

[miotas]

And it isn't about overindulging.

But you just said it was...

It's genuinely about the alcohol poisoning issue.

We had a similar thing a few years back where pre mixed alcoholic drinks like vodka cruisers were taxed to high hell in an effort to make them prohibitively expensive for teenagers to buy since teens were drinking them like they were soft drink and getting absurdly drunk. Government interference had no effect in this case and I doubt it will in yours either. Young people just switched to drinking hard liquor straight or mixing it themselves, neither of which is preferable to buying premixed.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

But you just said it was...

No..."overindulging" is used to mean "getting to drunk" but in a specific way. An indulgent way. This is an "oops" way.

We had a similar thing a few years back where pre mixed alcoholic drinks like vodka cruisers were taxed to high hell in an effort to make them prohibitively expensive for teenagers to buy since teens were drinking them like they were soft drink and getting absurdly drunk. Government interference had no effect in this case and I doubt it will in yours either. Young people just switched to drinking hard liquor straight or mixing it themselves, neither of which is preferable to buying premixed.

The claim is that the caffeine masks the signs of intoxication. So that people who would stop drinking because they felt trashed don't stop.



perfect.

Cle Elum Police Chief Scott Ferguson says that not only were the students drinking the crazy-in-a-can, they were also spiking it with rum and vodka. Questionable mixology that led to blood-alcohol levels ranging from the seriously soused (.12) to the perilously-close-to-death (.35).

The "they were drinking it" and "then they got alcohol poisoning" is not the kind of evidence I had in mind, for obvious reasons.

four lokos aren't bad just the people who drink them are dumb i've been drinking them for as long as they've been in stores don't ban FOUR LOKOS

[Hosakawa Tito]

They can take my Irish Coffee when they can pry my cold intoxicated fingers from the cup.

[rory_20_uk]

Is this ready mixed, or at point of sale (i.e. can bars sell the aforementioned Rum and coke or would the customer have to purchase both then mix them)?

Neither makes any sense to me. Red Bull and Vodka has been a popular drink for ages and people are prepared to go the extra mile of purchasing two drinks, as they have with many other types previously.

My personal favourite is vodka jelly. You could feed it to toddlers as there's no perception of alcohol. It sits in the stomach and slowly dissolves so you can eat a vast amount and it only kicks in later allowing one to get vastly more drunk than one intended to... Happy times.

I can understand that packaging should not hide the fact there is an alcoholic content, and it should also not be packaged in such a manner to appeal to an inappropriate audience, but FFS, in America you have to be 21 to even have a tipple!

[Furunculus]

ah the FDA, how i love them.

i once spent a fortnight trying to understand their massively convoluted medical device acceptance program, the result was a twenty four page report for our venture capital partners into how our software-device could be 'processed' through the FDA.

great fun, in a masochistic way.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Bless the Western democracies for having health inspections and food safety agencies.

You eat and drink stuff, kids put it in their mouths. Thank God independent government run agencies provide the consumer with some protection. Much as the cowboys of this world would prefer for all that regulation to dissappear.

[rory_20_uk]

I agree that we need the FDA / EMEA.

However - drugs that would never have made it under current rules:

Paracetamol, Aspirin, Amitriptiline, Vancomycin, probably morphine and all related opiates and there are probably many others; penicillin has severe adverse events and that might have torpedoed it. Beta blockers can kill asthmatics, that might have been the end of them.

I think that far more drugs should be allowed to be used by clinicians with extensive guidance. All the drugs above do have features that clinicians and where appropriate the general public have to be aware of. But they are still extremely useful substances. There are probably thousands of others that would be of great use to a large segment of society which were not given licenses whose risk could be easily managed - as they are with these old drugs that were passed when conditions were far less stringent. If the barrier to market entry was lowered, drugs would also cost a lot less as there would be more competition and less costs to recoup.

[Furunculus]

Much as the cowboys of this world would prefer for all that regulation to dissappear.

who are they?

[rory_20_uk]

Probably Pharmaceutical companies, who are eeeeevil as they place a value on human life as they sell products at a profit, which is almost the same as killing those that can't afford them.

Since I work for a Consultancy which gets a large part of its business helping companies through the hoops I don't want too much to go

[Furunculus]

ours was a relatively simple one in the end, non dangerous with lots of predicate devices.

the ceo of the VC tried to pass of my report as his own insights back to my boss, hilarious!

[Louis VI the Fat]

who are they?

This sort of guys, the kind of ruthless cowboys the FDA's of this world are up against:

Formula for disaster
The politics of an unconscionable delay

Sep 18th 2008 | SHIJIAZHUANG
“QUALITY and safety are the foundations of social harmony,” proclaim posters at the headquarters of the Sanlu Group in Shijiazhuang, capital of China’s northern province of Hebei. Sanlu was until recently one of China’s biggest producers of milk powder. Now, dozens of people, many clutching infants, queue in the hot sun outside to return powder that could be contaminated with a potentially lethal chemical. The harmony of China’s consumers has rarely been so tested.

The safety scandal engulfing not only Sanlu, fingered as the main culprit, but much of China’s dairy industry, is an embarrassment to China’s leaders. In July last year, after widespread complaints at home and abroad about tainted Chinese-made food and medicine, the authorities executed a former head of the country’s food-and-drug safety agency for taking bribes.
http://www.economist.com/node/122622...ry_id=12262271

Democracies do well to maintain a strong, politically independent 'FDA'. Lots of regulation and intrusive oversight of what I and our children put in our mouths? Yes please!

[rory_20_uk]

That isn't so much about the rules, but the implementation of them. What happened here was also illegal in China.

[Louis VI the Fat]

It is what happens when an FDA is weak.

Corporations wish to have no food regulation. They wish to sell tobacco, without meddlesome agency insisting it is bad for people. They wish to sell all sorts of bizarre 'food' that make its consumers horridly obese, without government regulating against it. They wish to produce acidy tasting wine and label it with a fancy Bordeaux name, to sell abroad.
Or, in this case, adding drugs that mask the addition of alcohol in power drinks.

Against all this, consumers need to protect themselves. Producers for their part, need to spend their energy lobbying against regulation, and need to try to influence public opinion to believe that public protection of what your child eats is not in the interest of the public.

[rory_20_uk]

Certainly in the UK, there is widespread fear concerning such things as E numbers and perversely the thinking that anything "organic" or "natural" is good. Aflotoxin-laden peanuts, anyone? Liver cancer is "natural" as well...
One chap tried to overdose on as many E numbers as possible. His doctor was vastly more concerned with his intake of salt and saturated fats (both "natural"...)

Yes, there are some exceptions to this rule. Tartrazine isn't good for a subset of adults and children (nor is a vast amount of simple sugar which is arguably worse - but is "natural").

If caffeine only hid the effect of alcohol I'd agree it should be banned, but this is not the case. The alcohol content is not hidden, which again would be a problem.

If the wine is not toxic and people buy it then fine. Surely the point of wine is to be consumed and enjoyed. If someone was cooking a meal and someone added an ingredient and it improved the meal, people would be happy and they would be lauded. Why is there a difference when this is wine?

What children eat should be determined by their parents, not for the government to ban anything that might be bad. For example, Salami is very fatty, and I have a couple of slices generally less than once a month. Should it be banned in case children might be eating one a day? Eating one avocado is good for you. Eating three a day isn't. Can we legislate against that as well?

[Strike For The South]

FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS

[Tellos Athenaios]

Is this about energy drinks? In that case, the USA's way forward is clear: ban the citizens from procuring any until they are 21. Weird but that's what you do if you don't allow alcohol for people under 21.
Is this *really* about mixing caffeine and alcohol in one drink? Then what next: no more tiramisù/tiramisu for you? Even if you are 21?

[gaelic cowboy]

No it is the same as the row over Red Bull and Vodka it is attributable to a rise in anti-social buck leaping at the weekend in younger people. Sometimes we really do meed to interfere despite all the talk of personal freedom I would prefer not to have to clean up after vodka fueled louts how about you.

[rory_20_uk]

It's the behaviour I care about, not how one gets there. Arrest and fine them for doing this rather than split hairs about what they chose to drink before doing so. And I don't agree with a blanket hike in alcohol prices as when I have a cold cider or a glass of G&T I should not be penalised by the actions of others merely who choose to drink similar commodities.

[Beskar]

who are they?

The ones who used to paint sugar sweets with lead paints because it makes them very vibrant, which is very appealing to kids. This is the stuff they used to pull before Food/Drug Safety bodies were around.

[rory_20_uk]

I think Chromium was more likely, at least for those lovely yellows and greens.

But although I'd not question their importance (lash lure was another key milestone - putting basically tar derivatives on eyelashes that led to scarring, blindness and even death) I still think that at the moment they're blocking too many new things.

[Crazed Rabbit]

It's like the outcry over the banning of trans fat. "the government is trying to ban tasty food!". But actually they are banning an industrial product that is used because it's cheap and convenient not because it tastes better.

Something they (Center for Science in the Public Interest) used to (1990) encourage the use of?

This is not about banning foods because of the taste or because the government thinks its business is to intervene in peoples diets. It's genuinely about the alcohol poisoning issue.

How is this not intervening in people's diets? Even if the issue is alcohol poisoning, it's still interference in what people consume.

Does this product really make it more likely, or are politicians just overreacting to some recent events? Some idiots misusing the drinks are no excuse for a ban, just like idiots killing themselves speeding are no excuse for a ban on really fast cars.

A second issue is people thinking they can drive. But the main issue is that the products are deemed deceptive. That's what you're skipping.

I thought it was genuinely about the alcohol poisoning, not deceptiveness. Does it not state the ABV and that it contains caffeine?

If you acknowledge that consumers can mix the drinks themselves then what was all that about "the government deciding how we drink". They are only deciding what we can buy conveniently prepackaged.

They are putting barriers to drinking certain items - making it harder to consume certain types of products and not others.

More generally though, I think you do a disservice to the true spirit of wanting to be free from government interference when you use this kind of rhetoric in defense of 24 ounce blue raspberry 12.0% abv energy drinks...if they are wrong then it is purely for the principle and the slippery slope nature.

It's like freedom of speech; you have to defend hateful speech to defend all speech. Here you have to defend something you'd never care to drink in order to protect your right to eat what you want without government taxes or regulations compelling you one way or another.

EDIT:

Bless the Western democracies for having health inspections and food safety agencies.

You eat and drink stuff, kids put it in their mouths. Thank God independent government run agencies provide the consumer with some protection. Much as the cowboys of this world would prefer for all that regulation to dissappear.

I am here to call your bluff. You haven't read the article or even a related wiki article.

This isn't about consumer protection. Caffeine and alcohol are both safe to drink, together or apart. An unsafe product would harm people who used any amount of it. This is a ban because the government believes there's the possibility you will drink too much and not control yourself.

As for the FDA; I have no love for them, nor for how they deny dying patients access to experimental treatments.

Against all this, consumers need to protect themselves.

Then let them do so by making their own decisions. We are not children and should not be treated as such.

CR

[Louis VI the Fat]

It's like freedom of speech; you have to defend hateful speech to defend all speech. Here you have to defend something you'd never care to drink in order to protect your right to eat what you want without government taxes or regulations compelling you one way or another.

CR

But..but what if I just want to pay somebody $1.62 a year to check all of my food for me? It's marvellously efficient.

They do not tell me what to eat, they are rather told by me to keep safe the food I enjoy eating.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Something they (Center for Science in the Public Interest) used to (1990) encourage the use of?

This is a non-sequitar CR

Why do you think trans fat isn't how I described it?

How is this not intervening in people's diets? Even if the issue is alcohol poisoning, it's still interference in what people consume.

So is controlling city tap water. Saying that it's intervening with something that people put in their mouths does not make your case, even when you try and phrase it so that it sounds like they are making the food pyramid compulsory.

Does this product really make it more likely, or are politicians just overreacting to some recent events? Some idiots misusing the drinks are no excuse for a ban, just like idiots killing themselves speeding are no excuse for a ban on really fast cars.

Yes exactly, does it? That's what I was asking you. If it does then they are justified don't you think?

I thought it was genuinely about the alcohol poisoning, not deceptiveness. Does it not state the ABV and that it contains caffeine?

caffeine-->feel like not drunk--> actually have alcohol poisoning == deceptive

They are putting barriers to drinking certain items - making it harder to consume certain types of products and not others.

Yes, so that people who want to drink energy drinks with caffeine have to go through an extra step, showing that they understand the risks and genuinely want to take them. And if they do they are free to do so.

It's like freedom of speech; you have to defend hateful speech to defend all speech. Here you have to defend something you'd never care to drink in order to protect your right to eat what you want without government taxes or regulations compelling you one way or another.

CR

You should sound different when you talk about the government banning non-hate speech than you do when you talk about them banning hate-speech. Way different. Same here. We're not going to ban the fda because they believe in some science research that claims 4 loko is unsafe. The slippery slope doesn't work here given the justification they used.