Spiked! (page 2 of 3)

Marketing to Kids

"Everybody is looking for that extra pick-me-up, from students who drink them to stay awake studying, to teenagers who want to stay up all night playing video games," says Dan Mayer, 25, who has taste-tested dozens of brands for his blog, Energy Drink Reviews.

Consuming three-quarters of a can of Cocaine landed Martinelli in the emergency room on an IV drip, dizzy and vomiting. At first the ER docs thought the teenager must be overdosing on drugs, Martinelli says. But after blood and urine tests, they found he was suffering serious dehydration from caffeine poisoning.

Recently Cocaine was outlawed after its manufacturer ran afoul of the FDA for marketing the drink as "liquid cocaine" and "the legal alternative" to the street drug. In response, the company renamed it Censored and put the drink back on the shelves, promoted with the slogan "Banned by the Man."

Beverage makers demur that they don't market their highly caffeinated rocket fuel to kids. Yet they're everywhere teens want to be, sponsoring events from skateboarding to fashion shows and concerts.

The drinks inspire such fandom that some guys in their own MySpace photos pose next to towering stacks of their favorite beverage, showing the whole world how many cans they'll dare to down. On YouTube, kids have even posted videos of themselves "shotgunning" energy drinks. That's puncturing the bottom of the can to chug it in one gulp. Teenage boys, natural extremists who just can't get enough of that jolt-in-a-can, compete to see how many they can slam and how quickly.

So it's no surprise that emergency room physicians and toxicologists around the country are noticing an increase in caffeine-related symptoms among young people. Last year, Guy Shochat, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, treated an 18-year-old who showed up in an ambulance with a heart rate of 220 (60 to 100 is normal). The patient, a recent high school grad, had been drinking eight 16-ounce cans of Rockstar every day to stay up for his night-shift job.

If you can't drink it, you can still swallow it -- in a pill. A study of data from the Illinois Poison Center found more than 250 cases that required medical attention from the overuse of caffeine pills like Vivarin and NoDoz. Average age of the overcaffeinated patients: 21. The most extreme overdoses are fatal. Last November a 19-year-old man had a heart attack and died after taking nearly two dozen NoDoz tablets.

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“ Once a day, sit in a quiet, dim room, close your eyes, and focus on one word. This helps reduce stress and decreases your susceptibility to colds. ”

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