As a college student, I live on energy drinks.  I am lucky if I get more than five hours of sleep a night, as evidenced by the fact that I am writing this post at almost 3 AM.  My personal brand of choice is Monster, but I am always open to change.  As I was scanning the headlines today, multiple news sources were reporting that Censored Energy Drinks were returning to the shelves.  For those of you that are energy drink aficionados, you may remember this brand better as Cocaine Energy Drink.  This brand was pulled from the shelves after the FDA deemed the drink illegal.  Now, I know what you’rethinking, but it wasn’t illegal because of the contents of the drink.  Cocaine Energy Drink certainly didn’t contain any cocaine, but they were marketing the drink as “the legal alternative”.  The FDA and several states didn’t like this one bit.  Apparently you can’t market something as the legal alternative to an illegal drug (though this strongly conflicts with my article on binaural beats at I-Doser, which is marketing their product as an alternative to multiple illegal drugs).  The drink has been renamed Censored (an obvious poke at the FDA) and will be back on shelves very soon.  The drink itself contains more caffeine than any drink on the market.  It packs more caffeine than a large Starbuck’s coffee into an 8 oz. can, and contains 3.5 times as much caffeine as a Redbull.  Needless to say, I might be trying it soon.

The issue at hand is whether the FDA is overstepping its bounds on this one.  Should they be allowed to censor certain brand names and advertising campaigns because of content like this?  It seems to me that marketing this drink as a legal alternative to Cocaine is exactly what it says: a legal alternative.  While anyone with half a brain knows that a ton of caffeine is NOT the same as doing cocaine, maybe the campaign was asking for trouble.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem like it causes any harm to anyone.  I can’t see too many Cocaine (energy drink) overdoses occurring, though you never know with kids these days.  I am an advocate of free speech, but I do draw the line when it comes to issues of health.  With that being said, I really don’t see the harm that could have come from this.  Who knows?  Maybe some cocaine (the drug) users get hooked on Cocaine (energy drink) instead!  While the name is controvertial, you have to hand it to the makers.  That name would have sold like wild fire, probably more out of curiosity than the desire for a “legal alternative” to the illegal drug.

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