It’s Friday night in this steep-hilled college town, and if anyone needs an excuse to party, here are two: In 30 minutes the Mountaineers football team will kick off against the UConn Huskies in East Hartford, Conn., and tonight begins the three-day Halloween weekend.
A few blocks from the West Virginia University campus, young people crowd the aisles of Ashebrooke Liquor Outlet, an airy shop that is popular among students. One rack in the chilled-beverage cooler is nearly empty, the one that is usually filled with 23.5-ounce cans of Four Loko, a fruity malt beverage that combines the caffeine of two cups of coffee with the buzz factor of four to six beers.
“That’s what everyone’s buying these days,” says a liquor store employee, “Loko and Burnett’s vodka,” a line of distilled spirits that are commonly mixed with nonalcoholic energy drinks like Red Bull and Monster to create fruity cocktails with a stimulating kick.
Four Loko’s name comes from its four primary ingredients—alcohol (12 percent by volume), caffeine, taurine, and guarana. Although it is among dozens of caffeinated alcoholic drinks on the market, Four Loko has come to symbolize the dangers of such beverages because of its role in binge-drinking incidents this fall involving students at New Jersey’s Ramapo College and at Central Washington University. Ramapo and Central Washington have banned Four Loko from their campuses, and several other colleges have sent urgent e-mail messages advising students not to drink it. But whether Four Loko is really “blackout in a can” or just the highest-profile social lubricant of the moment is unclear.
Just uphill from Ashebrooke Liquor Outlet, four young men stand on a porch sipping cans of Four Loko—fruit punch and cranberry-lemonade. All are upperclassmen except for one, Philip Donnachie, who graduated in May. He says most Four Loko drinkers he knows like to guzzle a can of it at home before meeting up with friends, a custom that researchers in the field call “predrinking.”
“Everyone that’s going to go out for the night, they’re going to start with a Four Loko first,” Mr. Donnachie says, adding that he generally switches to beer.
A student named Tony says he paid $5.28 at Ashebrooke for two Lokos—a bargain whether the goal is to get tipsy or flat-out drunk. Before the drink became infamous, he says, he would see students bring cans of it into classrooms. “The teachers didn’t know what it was,” Tony says, and if they asked, the student would casually reply, “It’s an energy drink.”
Farther uphill, on the sidewalk along Grant Avenue, the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz carries a Loko—watermelon flavor, judging by its color. Down the block a keg party spills out onto the front porch, where guests sprawl on a sofa and flick cigarette ashes over the railing. No one here is drinking Four Loko, but most are eager to talk about the product because they’ve heard that it could be banned by the federal government as a result of the student illnesses.
Research Gap
That’s not likely to happen anytime soon, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
“The FDA’s decision regarding the regulatory status of caffeine added to various alcoholic beverages will be a high priority for the agency,” Michael L. Herndon, an FDA spokesman, wrote in an e-mail message. “However, a decision regarding the use of caffeine in alcoholic beverages could take some time.” The FDA does not consider such drinks to be “generally recognized as safe.” A year ago the agency gave 27 manufacturers 30 days to provide evidence to the contrary, if it existed. Only 19 of the companies have responded.
Dennis L. Thombs is chairman of the department of social and behavioral sciences at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, in Fort Worth. He knows a great deal about the drinking habits of young people.
Last year he was the lead author on a paper submitted to the journal Addictive Behaviors that described his team’s study of bar patrons’ consumption of energy drinks and alcohol in the college town of Gainesville, Fla. After interviewing 802 patrons and testing their blood-alcohol content, Mr. Thombs and his fellow researchers concluded that energy drinks’ labels should clearly describe the ingredients, their amounts, and the potential risks involved in using the products.
But Mr. Thombs says the government should have more data before it decides what to do about alcoholic energy drinks.
“There’s still a big gap in this research,” he says. “We need to get better pharmacological measures in natural drinking environments” like bars.
He says he has submitted a grant application to the National Institutes of Health in hopes of doing just that.
‘Liquid Crack’
Back at the keg party in Morgantown, a student wearing Freddy Krueger’s brown fedora and razor-blade glove calls Four Loko “liquid crack” and says he prefers not to buy it for his underage friends. “I’ll buy them something else,” he says, “but not Four Loko.”
Dipsy from the Teletubbies says the people abusing Four Loko are younger students, mostly 17- and 18-year-olds. He calls the students who became ill at Ramapo and Central Washington “a bunch of kids that don’t know how to drink.”
Two freshmen at the party, Gabrielle and Meredith, appear to confirm that assertion.
“I like Four Loko because it’s cheap and it gets me drunk,” says Gabrielle, 19, who seems well on her way to getting drunk tonight, Four Loko or not. “Especially for concerts. I drink two Four Lokos before going, and then I don’t have to spend $14 on a couple drinks at the stadium.”
Meredith, 18 and equally intoxicated, says that although she drinks Four Loko, she favors a ban. “They’re 600 calories, and they’re gross.”
An interview with Alex, a 19-year-old student at a religiously affiliated college in the Pacific Northwest, suggests one reason that the drink might be popular among a younger crowd. In his state and many others, the laws that govern the sale of Four Loko and beer are less stringent than those for hard liquor.
That eases the hassle for older friends who buy for Alex. These days that’s not a concern, though. He stopped drinking Four Loko because of how it made him feel the next day.
“Every time I drank it I got, like, a blackout,” says Alex. “Now I usually just drink beer.”
