The other cocaine

Graphic by Joshua Covarrubias/The Chronicle

Don’t blow your dough on this snow
By Cyryl Jakubowski

Once in a while there comes a story that paints a beautiful portrait of American advertising culture gone berserk. It speaks volumes about the capitalist landscape. Only in this country does a company have the balls to name an energy drink after the age-old Peruvian marching powder—cocaine.

Comedian Denis Leary once said that “the best pitch I ever heard about cocaine was back in the early ’80s when a street dealer followed me down the sidewalk going, ‘I got some great blow man. I got the stuff that killed Belushi.’”

Of course, cocaine the drug doesn’t really need a sales pitch. It sells itself. However obvious it is that energy drink companies will do anything to sell their swill, calling your product after a drug that ruined noses and lives since the ’70s is irresponsible.

Last week a Las Vegas company, Redux Beverages, announced the release of a new line of energy drinks targeted for partygoers—you know, drunks staggering in nightclubs. The energy drink, Cocaine, is 350 percent stronger than Red Bull and gives you no crash since it uses dextrose instead of cane sugar and other ingredients like vitamin B12 and other stuff found in Red Bull.

Red Bull, the benchmark to which all other energy drinks are compared, is also a key ingredient in a Jagermeister bomb. But just as you would never mix real cocaine with alcohol (because no one does that, right?), energy drinks are not intended for mixing it with booze—it just sort of happens. Call it a party favor.

“We do not technically advocate the mixing of Cocaine with alcohol, but if we did here’s what we’d try,” Drinkcocaine.com, the product’s website, wrote. Then it runs down a laundry list of possible drink mixes with names like Liquid Cocaine and Cocaine Blast.

The drink will not be marketed for health nuts or workaholics, but will be sold to partygoers at nightclubs in New York this fall. That’s exactly what the Lindsay Lohan scene needs—more excuses to stay up later and fall down harder.

Even though there is no cocaine inside, the makers of the drink argue that its effects are part chemical and part psychological.

“When a person sees the name of the drink, some psychological effect happens and the person is already experiencing the energy buzz before they even open the can,” James Kirby, inventor of the drink, said in the New York Post.

The company also said that the drink gives you a “high” within five minutes, followed by a caffeine boost 15 minutes later, according to the New York Post. The website claims that “Cocaine is not just a re-hash of existing drinks: It is a completely unique new formula - it tastes like a fireball, a carbonated atomic fireball!”

What exactly is a carbonated atomic fireball? To me it sounds like a lit up fart.

“I can think of no other product except real cocaine that could have that effect on the public,” Kirby told the Post. He also said that there is an ingredient, which is being kept secret, that was added to the drink to numb the throat and simulate the effects of actual cocaine, according to the New York Post.

But before you get excited and call your friends in New York to ship you a couple of kilos of the legal alternative Cocaine, think of this as nothing more than a feeble attempt at getting college students’ money. Obviously they are trying to get you to try to mix it with booze. Red Bull and vodka is nothing new, and Redux is trying to capitalize on that idea by sparking controversy with its namesake.

While Redux has every right to call it’s product Cocaine, it just sends the wrong message to young folks. “Well, shit, if this stuff gets me high, I wonder what the real thing will do?”

Beside, cocaine the drug already has a bad enough reputation. According to the DEA, nearly 2,600 kilograms of coke were seized last year in Illinois and 120,000 kilos in the nation. Chicago is the major transportation hub and distribution center throughout the Midwest because of its location. There’s a shitload of cocaine out there on the streets and we don’t need anymore of it even though humorist and commentator P.J. O’Rourke once said, “Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system.”

When I think of cocaine the drug, I don’t think about Eric Clapton’s song, (however catchy), “Cocaine” which glamorized its use, but about the friends I’ve seen swallowed by their addictions. When I think of Cocaine the energy drink I think of some jackass kid overdosing because nobody told him that perhaps he shouldn’t be mixing cocaine with Cocaine. But live and let live.

Let’s get serious. Naming your product Cocaine only furthers the acceptance of the drug. Red Bull is already known as “liquid crack” in the party circuit. And while some energy drinks are often viewed as health supplements, some people might get the wrong idea with a drink like Cocaine. What’s next? Branding sleeping pills Heroin or apples with a methamphetamine sticker that says “made in rural Illinois?”

Just as I wouldn’t go out of my way to score some blow off the street, I likely won’t jump on the back of the charging red bull or a Ginseng monster to the nearest dealer in order to get my can of Cocaine—unless the first fix is free. Furthering cocaine’s appeal by calling an energy drink after it is irresponsible.