Four Loko is the most talked about but least drunk libation in
America. Michigan recently joined Utah, Oklahoma, and Washington in
banning the alcoholic energy drink. And last weekend, Connecticut
and New York strong-armed distributors into agreeing to stop
delivering the boozy concoction.
The bans and scare stories intend to dissuade the public.
But for drinkers, they pique our curiosity. Whoever said all
publicity is good publicity probably works for Four Loko
now.
I embark upon a quest not unlike Ponce de Leon’s search
for the Fountain of Youth or the Crusaders’ attempts to drink from
the Holy Grail. I long to sip the mythical Four Loko from its
multicolored aluminum chalice (which can be redeemed for five cents
here in Massachusetts).
I go in search of Four Loko at the supermarket-style
liquor store down the street. The customer is immediately
confronted with a complementary wine tasting. Cheese and crackers
accompany. A policeman stalks, not because the store attracts shady
customers but because the proprietors wish to scare them away. Grey
Goose, Chimay, and Dom Perignon jump from the shelves into the
affluent shopper’s carriage. You have arrived if you buy booze
here. But has Four Loko arrived? Where is the 24-ounce sensation
sweeping the nation?
I migrate from uptown to the bowels of the city. Here I
won’t find Four Loko. Four Loko will find me. In this liquor
store’s parking lot, keep-the-meter-running cabs await
DUI-offenders dissuaded from driving but not from drinking. Inside,
Bay State bottle-bill beneficiaries cash-in on can collection. At
the register, sales of singles, nips, and discount 30-packs
prevail. If not Four Loko here, Four Loko where?
A long walk to the back cooler brings me no closer to the
coveted elixir. But I migrate leftward and the products steadily
become more affordable and less delectable. At the ghetto end of
the ice box — where 40-ouncers and malt liquors reside — the
colorful can cacophony for which I search explodes in view:
Watermelon, Fruit Punch, Grape, Orange, Blue Raspberry, Lemon Lime,
Lemonade, and Cranberry Lemonade. After much inspection and
indecision, I select Watermelon and Fruit Punch. As if this Four
Loko Eden couldn’t get any more heavenly, the cashier asks for
$2.68 per can. It’s the alcohol equal of a six-pack. But it’s the
cash-register superior.
Should I mistake the oversize king cans for, say, Arizona
Iced Tea, banner lettering near the mouth reminds: “CONTAINS
ALCOHOL.” What would be redundant on an ominous bottle of Jack
Daniel’s is necessary on the bright and bouncy can of Four Loko.
Mixed-message schizophrenia prevails. And in case underage
consumers missed that alcohol notification, the can features a “WE
ID” button. Despite the container’s promise, neither the
manufacturer nor the cashier asks for my license. The product that
neo-prohibitionist solons and snobbish supermarket-style liquor
stores have tried to deny me, I finally obtain.
But to properly prepare for this nectar of the godless, I
lubricate its path with several Busch beers and fill my stomach
with dinner for its anticipated guest. At long last, I crack the
can.
Four Loko, we have met before. Then, you called yourself
Mad Dog 20/20. Or was it Peach Schnapps? You are known by different
monikers (Bacardi 151, Power Master, Night Train, etc.). But
beneath your many guises your intent is forever the same: to get
people really drunk really fast really cheap.
The Fruit Punch variant is saccharine sweet and heavily
carbonated. Its taste evokes a wine cooler, but malt liquor —
buried beneath sugars and sweeteners — is its well-disguised base.
There is a strong aftertaste. A drinker might find one pleasant
enough; but the sticky-sweet remnant in the throat is a vomit-bomb
ready to explode upon added ammunition. Moderation, because of the
masked alcohol, because of the caffeine, because of the
overpowering sweetness, seems the key here.
A discussion with a drinking partner concludes that my can
of Four Loko recalls Luden’s cherry cough drops or that cheap
powder-based children’s fruit punch known colloquially as bug
juice. We decide his Watermelon version seems based on Jolly
Rancher candy. “This is geared toward minors,” he matter-of-factly
explains. “No adult wants to buy a can that has five different
colors or a crazy color scheme.”
The many warnings of its potency compel me to slowly
imbibe it over 90 minutes. On a scale of One to Four Loko, I am
only a Two Loko. Despite my caution, the drawn out drinking rescues
me from sober to buzz. And it does so in a sneaky manner akin to
Red Bull and vodka, the popular bar drink that also combines the
depressant alcohol with the stimulants taurine, caffeine, guarana,
and sugar. It’s a different drunk.
There is no movement to ban Red Bull and vodka, or rum and
Coke and Irish coffee for that matter. Drinkers have been combining
alcohol with stimulants for centuries. What’s different here is
that manufacturers, rather than drinkers or their bartenders, are
mixing the booze with caffeine at the factory. That, combined with
its nice price and viral marketing toward inexperienced drinkers,
provokes the ire of paternalistic Puritans forever obsessed with
what people unlike them do for amusement.
Just a few days after my experiment, I am alive but Four
Loko’s survival is precarious. A Massachusetts commission plans to
impose a statewide ban on Monday, and with the encouragement of
professional scold Chuck Schumer, the Food and Drug Administration
has clobbered the strange brew, too. I got my taste before the
government took it away.
Aside from an outright ban, there are calls to increase
taxes on such drinks or make the labeling more explicit. But a
better idea than can be gleaned from the Food and Drug
Administration’s newly introduced visual warnings against
cigarettes. If a cancer ward image accurately relays the story of
tobacco use, then certainly the picture of a girls-gone-wild
sorority house sums up the thousand words of Four Loko. Alas,
telling the truth will only increase its popularity.
