caffeine/secondary effects

Joe Sixpack this week has a good and thorough look at the many beer labels that talk about and tip a hat to their colleague, marijuana. The numbers and audacity are surely growing, as the old and antiquated laws fall by the wayside a bit. I like the quaint and funny reference to coats of arms:

With this month’s ballyhooed legalization of marijuana in Colorado, some beer makers are adding playful drug references to their brand names and labels, and regulators can do little to censor them. Label oversight, a quirky if contentious area of federal alcohol law, has confounded breweries for years with often capricious standards that bear little on consumer protection. Federal law, for example, oddly prohibits the use of coats of arms or wording that promises ‘pre-war strength,’ whatever that means.

Mr. Russell (aka Joe) also helped educate me that a safety meeting is not necessarily boring and dire:

Yes, there are limits. Dark Horse Brewing, in Michigan, lost its bid for Smells Like Weed IPA, though its hops, in fact, smell like pot. The name was later changed to Smells Like A Safety Meeting IPA. (A ‘safety meeting’ is slang for taking a break on the job to light up a doober.) But expect to see fewer of those objections as...

In a massive and coordinated action yesterday, the Federal Government moved to favor Red Bull and pummel other drinks with caffeine. FDA handed a giant gift to Red Bull here. The FTC handed a humongous present to Red Bull here. Other actions are expected imminently, as legions of other regulators rush in to exaggerate the dangers (it looks like soda, it’s “loaded with caffeine,” it’s like a “plague” and “toxic”) and ignore evidence to the contrary. This follows many state actions in recent weeks. Presto, problem solved! We eagerly await the evidence that young people cut back on alcohol, or cut back on co-consumption of  alcohol with caffeine. We hope it’s better than the current leading study; it purports to highlight the dangers of the pre-mixed products such as Four Loko, Liquid Charge, Joose and scores of others — without ever having examined any such products. Instead, the O’Brien study reviewed products so different they are not even within the scope of yesterday’s governmental actions (none of which, after some dexterous sleight of hand and misdirection, stopped it from instigating the above actions). We believe caffeine and alcohol raise plenty of important public policy issues, whether they are combined or not, and they warrant serious deliberation. But many of the deliberations so far reflect political pressures...

This Sparks label may well be the label that ignited a big controversy, coming to a boil eight years later. As near as we can tell, it is the first or one of the very first label approvals showing the direct addition of caffeine. Since then, TTB has approved hundreds or thousands of labels with a similar caffeine-alcohol combination as per this list, as explained by TTB here. Beginning about two years ago, CSPI began vigorously challenging caffeine-alcohol combination, and then the states and the FTC jumped in. In November of 2009 FDA said the drinks probably should not be allowed. Caffeinated Sparks is gone, but the controversy burns on. Holty’s Cyclone is a much earlier approval, and contains at least two sources of caffeine — but it does not have the directly-added caffeine that makes the 2001 Sparks approval noteworthy. Holty’s is beer with added ginseng, guarana and kola nut. It is quite amazing that Holty’s has an image of a doctor examining the beer and seeming to approve, along with a reference to Dr. Holty. It is also surprising that the product lacks anything resembling a modern statement of composition. The terms are all over the place, from lager to herbs to the stimulants.