Four Loko, For Sure – by Mike Gold Brainiac On Banjo #195
November 8, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments
When it comes to the latest college fad, I find myself agreeing with traditional conservative philosophy.
For decades conservatives have been telling us we’ve got too many laws and we should use the ones we’ve got. I generally agree with this concept, although I almost always disagree with them as to which laws are superfluous. Laissez-faire is a license to kill. Just ask BP Oil.
In case you’ve just left your cave for a drink, I will start with the mandatory background information. There’s this big to-do about Four Loko, one of those high caffeine energy drinks. However, Four Loko has quite a dramatic kick – the kick of alcohol. 12% by volume, in fact, which in its common 24-ounce package is about the same as four cans of beer. At $2.50 a can, Four Loko is pretty inexpensive.
In other words, it’s an effective and a cheap buzz.
Predictably, college kids have been lapping it up and, just as predictably, concerned parents who can’t figure out how to actually raise their own children have been calling for its ban. Hustling politicians and short-attention-span surface-level do-gooders rapidly jumped on the bandwagon.
I disagree with the proposed ban. Yes, kids have been getting sick and getting into accidents and even getting dead. But my argument isn’t Darwinian, it’s conservative: Four Loko is an alcoholic drink. You’re not supposed to sell alcohol to kids.
Enforce that law.
Part of the problem is that Four Loko looks like the non-alcohol energy drinks, so perhaps part of the solution is to make it look different and to prominently display the word alcohol. That’s simply truth in advertising. But I think given the controversy most store clerks have been catching on, and storeowners certainly do not want to risk losing their liquor license.
The right remedy is already on the books. Let’s enforce it.
Oh. And no, I do not drink alcohol. I get my buzz on the old-fashioned way. I roll grammar school children for their Dexamyl.
Fellow-traveler, anarcho-syndicalist and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.
Vinnie Bartilucci
November 8, 2010 - 12:35 pm
This latest frooferau baffled me. The first I heard of was in the headline “move to ban high-alcohol energy drink”. My immediate reaction mirrored yours – “doesn’t that make it an adult beverage?”
The far more fascinating tempests are when a product is deemed to look too much like an alcoholic beverage and banned for no other reason. RC Cola had a premium brand called “RC Draft” for a while, and people complained that the design looked too much like a beer bottle. There was a brand of lemonade that came in a hip flask – didn’t even stay on the shelves long enough for me to remember its name. And did they ever stop bitching about the energy drink called “cocaine”?
Of course, this all pales before the most insidious “lookalike” products out there – vegan food made to look like meat. Same exact concept – people who can’t or won’t eat certain things, but are desperate to “fit in”.
Marc Alan Fishman
November 8, 2010 - 12:51 pm
Score one for the graphic designers! In this day and age of over hyped, mass produced, always available products… they done found how to market cheap booze in brightly colored cans to attract the “college frat beer pong binge cause we don’t give a damn how much our parents spend to send us here to actually learn something” market! And the jew in me says “2.50 for 4 beers? Does it come in Mogen David flavor??”
First off to the parents crying to their congressmen… try RAISING your kids to know the difference between right and wrong… and why drugs and alcohol only inhibit the mind and destroy the body. My parents did. And I know how to have a damn good time too. Second of all, even if you raised em right and they still want to experiment? Guess what? You’re shit outta luck if they do want to. You don’t think those “of age” aren’t buying it for those who aren’t in college towns? Then you’re not looking too hard. Simply put, as long as there’s been hooch and drugs and illegal goodies out there… there’s always been a way to get em. And there’s no law, enforcement, or anything otherwise that’ll stop it cold.
Simply put, the real people to talk to about this are the kids in high school on the cusp of wanting to try out all this “grown up” stuff. Let them know, in calm, reasonable, rational voices that “no, one joint won’t ruin your life” and “an occasional drink out with the gang won’t turn you into an alcoholic”… but left unchecked, and without restraint and love for ones’ self… you can do unmeasurable damage to yourself and those you love by simply giving in to the readily available vices that surround us everyday.
John Tebbel
November 8, 2010 - 1:16 pm
I don’t suppose you want to hear about all the years my dad spent down in the basement working on Three Loko.
Mike Gold
November 8, 2010 - 1:29 pm
John — Evidently your dad was one loko short of a fad.
Vinnie — Adriane and I just spent some time at the supermarket discussing the unreality of vegan look-alike foods. If you want to be vegan, be vegan and stop trying to pass off tufu turds as real food. The fact is, vegans cannot pass unless they have already taken a vow of silence.
Marc — You know, from what I’ve been reading it seems like Four Loko must taste like Mogen David. That’s the product undoubtedly responsible for my dislike of alcoholic beverages.
McCarthy
November 8, 2010 - 2:31 pm
Good news, children of San Francisco. There’s a NEW happy meal in town, get it before “the man” bans that, too. And fuck a Megamind 3D movie tie-in toy . . . why play with a Will Ferrell action figure when Four Loko lets you BE Charlie Sheen.
Rick Oliver
November 8, 2010 - 3:28 pm
Finally! A product to make normal people bipolar! I’m so happy! No wait, now I’m sad. Now I’m happy again. Give me another!
Mike Gold
November 8, 2010 - 3:32 pm
Rick, define “normal.”
McCarthy, I remember way back when you had to be a member of a touring rock band in order to trash your hotel room. Or at least write for Rolling Stone.
I can hardly wait for that hooker’s book.
pennie
November 8, 2010 - 4:27 pm
Mike, I’m still writing. Need to learn to speel wearing thigh-highs…
R. Maheras
November 8, 2010 - 4:56 pm
Yeah, laws don’t mean diddley if they aren’t enforced.
When people lobby their politicians for laws and the laws are successfully passed, it makes the people are happy because they feel like they’ve accomplished something. And the politicians are happy because they feel like they’ve scored points with constituents. But if the laws aren’t enforced, or enforced sporadically (or more insidiously, enforced selectively), they are pretty much useless.
Mike Gold
November 8, 2010 - 5:05 pm
Russ, that’s the absolute heart of our problems. Very few laws are enforced very often, and there’s a whole lot of end-runs around the laws when they are enforced. We’ve got a lot of duplicate laws on the books, some with the purpose of enforcing other laws that aren’t enforced. All of this creates a disrespect for the law itself: how can you respect a system that looks like a ping-pong game between crackheads?
MOTU
November 8, 2010 - 11:39 pm
‘Oh. And no, I do not drink alcohol. I get my buzz on the old-fashioned way. I roll grammar school children for their Dexamyl.’
Statements like this are one of the many reasons I love you man.
JosephW
November 10, 2010 - 10:23 pm
Unless there’s a LAW passed to ban the sale of alcohol to LEGALLY ADULT (as in “over 21 years of age) COLLEGE-GOERS, it’s really stupid for people to get outraged that college kids are going to drink. Perhaps that’s one reason why it was so fucking stupid for Ronald Ray-gun to have signed an executive order raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 (granted, no state actually had to do this, but the states also faced losing federal highway funding; of course, in most circumstances, this would have been denounced as extortion, but hypocrisy is SOP for RepubliCONs). The reason given at the time was to keep those under 18 from hanging out with their older (ie, over 18) friends at parties where booze would be served so, instead, let’s just raise it to 21 where those “impressionable” 18 to 20 year-olds would be mingling with 21 year olds at school.
Of course, this whole obsession with “legal age” in the US is just utterly insane. How old do you need to be to be “legal”? Well, it all depends on what you need to be “legal” for. To have consensual sex, in most states it’s 16 (provided your partner is not more than a couple of years older than you). To vote, it’s 18. To sign a contract, it’s usually 18. To drive by yourself, it’s typically 18 (though most states have either a variety of little loopholes or a series of incremental steps). To die for your country, it’s 18. To buy tobacco, it depends on the state (and COMPLETELY dependent on what state you’re in–I live in Alabama where you’re *supposed* to be 19, but in Georgia, it’s 18, and just think how much fun it was for 18-year-old Georgia smokers passing through ‘Bama on their way to Panama City or Pensacola for spring break stopping at a convenience store). But, for liquor, it’s 21.