When you say the words "stimulant junkie," people automatically think towards harder drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines. The unfortunate reality of life in North America is that many in some capacity over-use stimulants; see the daily coffee rituals and the irritation caused if missed...

Ah, caffeine. That's where this is largely going — our over-reliance on caffeine. It's almost as if we're having two separate conversations with regards to drugs in our society. On one hand, groups such as the DEA and UN monitoring bodies largely evaluate drug use through charting things like how prevalent and used drugs are in society; see, for instance, the continual monitoring of availability of drugs to youth, one of the most commonly used stats the drug warriors have in their arsenal.

Yet, on the other hand, if we step back for a second and say, "Whoa, compared even to alcohol and nicotine, caffeine is way more pervasive," people scoff and note that caffeine is a far more benign drug than, say, cannabis. Yet, if we were evaluating based on effect, we'd realize that cannabis is far more benign than pretty much anything, and we'd wonder why alcohol is legal. Clearly both discussions temper our discussion of drug usage in society, but it's worth realizing that pervasiveness extends both ways — "drug" is quite hard to define indeed.

Is caffeine something to worry about, though? I used to not think so. But then I started consuming energy drinks.

My experience with caffeine is long and multifaceted. I consumed my first pot of coffee in grade eight, while rockin' an all-nighter to finish an art project. I didn't consume much more of it until about grade ten, when I started drinking it continuously with friends at 24 hour truck stops.

I've always wondered what other "weird" kids in small towns do for fun. If you're a popular kid in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, you play sports, you build cars and you go to parties and drink beer. If you're a weird kid in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, you play videogames, you build computers and you go to Smitty's and drink coffee. As someone with only one dream — to get the fuck out of Dodge — I felt discussing Nietzsche at length while drinking endless cups of black coffee was a better use of my time (If anyone didn't already think I'm a pretentious nutjob), and thus began my continuing use of caffeine in coffee form.

It goes earlier than that, though; caffeine is everywhere. Let's go way back... According to my parents, the second word I ever learned — just after "No" — was "Coke!". And let's not mince words here — I fuckin' love my cola. Pepsi, Coke, R.C., Jones, Jolt, Walmart-brand, President's Choice... I drink it all. Along with the 3-20 cups of coffee I'd drink on any given night at Smitty's, my friend and I had a game of driving around to the various supermarkets at 2:00 in the morning and raiding their cheap soda machines with whatever change was in my ashtray.

The discussion of caffeine as a drug takes four strains in my mind: minor amounts in chocolate and various foods (And ask anyone, I eat a tonne of chocolate), small amounts in soda and Cola, moderate amounts in coffee and intense amounts in energy drinks and compressed tablets. Most people don't think about caffeine as having an effect in the first two categories, unless, of course, you have a hyperactive 10-year-old cousin who starts bouncing off the walls after a can of Dr. Pepper. It usually takes for the amount present in coffee for anyone to start taking note. For instance, I would perpetually hear how caffeine would stunt my growth when I drank it while younger (I'm 6'4), or ruin my sleep patterns, or any host of the other caffeinated worries. This fear escalates (Or at least it did with my parents) with the introduction of energy drinks, something that happened around grade nine for me with the start of Red Bull distribution in North America. However, I was also a massive fan of early energy drinks such as Jolt Cola and the short-lived Jones Whoop-Ass! slightly prior to this.

University was in many ways my first step into adult life, and my caffeine consumption only increased. My routine for all-nightering term papers was a 4-pack of 250mL Red Bull, two 750mL Jolt Blue cans, two 750mL Joker energy drinks (This preference has since moved to Mountain Dew's fantastic-tasting Amp series), a 12-cup pot of coffee and sometimes concentrated caffeine pills such as WakeMeUps. To add to the stimulant load, I began smoking more heavily, since I found it helped my focus (especially with all that caffeine on board) in the wee hours of the morning.

With a semester left in university, I drink anywhere from 2-4 tallboy-sized energy drinks and smoke half a package of cigarettes a day. I'm going to force myself through withdrawal all of August if only for the pure economics of it, and because my sleep patterns are completely fucked. The physiological withdrawal symptoms I feel if I go a day without drinking any caffeine are enough to make my productivity drop, which is an increasingly frightening realization. I've found my baseline at about 3 cigarettes and 2 cups of coffee a day, but less than that I start to get grumpy. Doesn't seem so beneign now, does it?

What especially frightens me about how society is moving more and more in the direction of stimulants is how it's escalated since the introduction of energy drinks. Before, you would get 250mL — a piddly amount by modern standards — in a small glass bottle that made it look like it contained peroxide. Now you can buy four packs of 1-litre Red Rain for less than what a 4-can cube of Red Bull costs. It doesn't stop there — the "5-hour energy" shots that began as a 7-11 oddity are now so ubiquitous that even Pepsi is making them. Never before have we seen such a pronounced shift in the marketing direction of beverage companies — no longer is it for the taste, but rather, the pharmacological component. Anyone who has actually surveyed a number of the energy drinks on the market knows this is most definitely the case.

The packaging is also reflective of this. How many regular soft drinks were packaged in tallboy (750mL) or smallboy (250mL) cans before Red Bull started doing it? As it stands, you can walk into any convenience store and the only cans that will be in tallboy format are either energy drinks or beer — both of which are categorized largely by their pharmacological component. I remember buying one of the new Beaver Buzz gourmet colas (Which are in smallboy format) and becoming supremely pissed when I realized they were caffeine-free. The package size itself denotes pharmacological component. And when you look at the many lines of tallboy-sized (Or super-jumbo sized in some cases) energy drinks, the pervasiveness of legal stimulants is particularly worrisome.

I've talked about caffeine for most of this, but it's only one pharmacologically-active reagent in modern energy drinks. The "energy shot" companies can claim their product has exponentially more caffeine than Red Bull because Red Bull doesn't have very much at all — the active ingredient is instead Guarana. So, in reality, an energy drink addiction is in many capacities a multi-drug addiction: caffeine and guarana (And perhaps sugar).

The fact that we as a society frown on people for smoking pot but can nonchalantly ignore the continued escalation of the energy drink market shows just how insane our society's discussion of drugs has become.

Wish me luck in August.

-Ændrew.

       

Written by :

Ændrew Rininsland