Four Loko Does Its Job With Efficiency and Economy, Students SayDon Troop
from the Chronicle
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 has banned Four Loko from its campus, 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.
The rest of the article...
So... this could thin the herd of drink-flakes. Sounds like a silver lining to me.
ReplyDeleteIn England they have Buckfast Tonic Wine (12% wine with caffeine (historically cocaine).
ReplyDeleteOf all the anti-social related arrests, the vast majority of them included alcohol (round 75% I think) and of those alco related ASBOs 49% were due to Buckfast alone.
I drink...I respect the drink...we lose sight of how powerful it can be.
Of course I missed this delicious treat, being so old and infirm and many years away from the unergrad days. We just had Schaefer's beer and mushrooms.
ReplyDelete"several other colleges have sent email messages advising students not to drink it."
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like the time in prep school when a very chagrined-looking headmaster got up in front of our assembled student body and informed us, though clenched teeth, that there was a lot of "contaminated marijuana" on campus and that we should not under any circumstances "consume any marijuana that [we] may have gotten in the past week."
Students were given 1/2 a day to dispose of their Potentially Contaminated Marijuana in the public trash cans of their dormitories without fear of reprisal.
My prep school was specifically empowered to act "in loco parentis." So...uh...are colleges supposed to do that now, too?
I'd bet you can't buy a can of this shit anywhere near George Fox University, where their recent job ads include this language:
ReplyDeleteGeorge Fox University, a Christ-centered community, prepares students spiritually, academically, and professionally to think with clarity, act with integrity, and serve with passion. Professors teach all truth as God's truth, integrating all fields of learning around the person and work of Jesus Christ, bringing the divine revelations through sense, reason, and intuition to the confirming test of Scripture. All applicants must express a personal commitment to Jesus Christ and express their Christian testimony in a local church. In addition, professors agree to live in agreement with the university lifestyle statement and affirm the theological commitments expressed in the Statement of Faith.
I'd like to teach all of my truth as God's truth, but there is not enough Four Loco on the planet!