The Fine Line Between Pleasure and Harm

February 12, 2023 10:49 AM

Four Loko, the "blackout in a can", fifteen years later. It tasted of the artificial tang of Smarties with a foreboding bitterness; the sun set over the skyline, and then—nothing. I was told later that we ate pizza, that I called my partner, that I ran... somewhere, and that I hadn’t even finished my can. Oh wait, there was one more memory: This felt weirder, wilder and darker than being drunk.
posted by Hypatia (75 comments total)

I saved a can of original Four Loko. It’s in my fridge. I’m saving it for a special day.
posted by chrchr at 11:04 AM on February 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

Brooklyn Assemblyman Félix Ortiz, in an attempt to prove to constituents how dangerous it was, drank as much Four Loko as he could in an hour on New York’s NBC station, with a doctor measuring his vital signs. His blood pressure shot up, and eventually he vomited off-screen. He urged New York to ban the beverage. “I was the first legislator around the country to really develop the momentum of banning Four Loko from the small stores and supermarkets,” he tells me. (Ortiz, despite being one of the orchestrators of the political response against Four Loko, did not even realize the drink contained alcohol when he was interviewed for this story.)

War on [Some] Drugs ftw.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:25 AM on February 12, 2023

I guess every generation has their Four Loko. For me as a Gen X high schooler around 1990, we had the diabolically strong wine cooler impersonator Cisco.
posted by Liquidwolf at 11:25 AM on February 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

I met my wife around the time this stuff hit the streets.

It's a bloody miracle she's still around.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:29 AM on February 12, 2023

I drank one after a bottle of tequila once. Do not recommend.
posted by sara is disenchanted at 11:29 AM on February 12, 2023

Years ago, I had a friend introduce me to Buckfast. "It's like coffee in your wine" was the quote. One sip and I noped out. The flavor alone, blech.
posted by ishmael at 11:40 AM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I initially read the title as The Fine Line Between Pleasure and Ham, and thought "aren't they the same thing?"
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:44 AM on February 12, 2023 [43 favorites]

I just learned about the Black Out Rage Gallon which seems like splitting the difference between harm reduction and harm maximization.
posted by credulous at 11:53 AM on February 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

the borg will assimilate every one of you
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 11:58 AM on February 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

The thing about Four Loko, the original formulation was not only was it like 30 proof, but it also had a ridiculous amount of caffeine and TONS of sugar of some form. Like, if your body breaks alcohol down into sugars, you're also flooding the zone with sugar at the same time. It's like you're begging your pancreas and liver to team up in rebellion against your body.

It was substantially less awful when they cut out the caffeine because they didn't have to put in as much sugar to mask that taste. It was still awful, but it wasn't that particular combination of awful.
posted by hippybear at 12:04 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Years ago, I had a friend introduce me to Buckfast......

Some comments from the r/wine thread where OP did a buckfast tasting.....

"Pour it down the drain. Then apologize to the drain."

"Buckfast is sometimes referred to as a bottle of 'What the fook are you looking at?'"
posted by lalochezia at 12:09 PM on February 12, 2023 [19 favorites]

For me as a Gen X high schooler around 1990, we had the diabolically strong wine cooler impersonator Cisco.

This was one of my high school best friend's drink of choice. It smelled like cherry flavoured gasoline. For me, it was cheap beer or Boone's Farm.
posted by Kitteh at 12:11 PM on February 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

God, when Four Loko first came out I definitely got on my high horse about having tried Buckfast before caffeinated alcohol was cool. That should have been seen as a cry for help about my blackout drinking problem, but that took another half a decade or so. (I'm in a better place now fortunately.)
posted by Tesseractive at 12:14 PM on February 12, 2023 [18 favorites]

I genuinely do not understand why this is such a remarkable substance when it's the kind of caffeine I would routinely drink before going out in my 20s plus... some alcohol. That's two of those little cans of Red Bull, or one of the biggish (but not the biggest) ones. One of lower-potency Rock Stars or Monsters. I used to occasionally have a Jagerbomb or two, and I would regularly have an energy drink and then go out and drink several shots of hard liquor. Is that... not what being drunk on Four Loko feels like?
posted by restless_nomad at 12:58 PM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, if you have six of them you are gonna have A Night, but the article describes having a fraction of a can and then having Feelings, and it sounds to me like the placebo effect.
posted by restless_nomad at 1:00 PM on February 12, 2023 [14 favorites]

I guess it’s a little faster than drinking, say, a series of Jager bombs. It’ll take time to order each bomb at the bar, after all, and for the bartender to pour it.
posted by Mr. Excellent at 1:06 PM on February 12, 2023

restless_nomad I'm gonna have to fail to concur here. I can drink one tiny little 8oz cup of regular coffee and be a tweaking anxiety monster for the whole day. I cannot tell you how badly the night went that one time I drank one Red Bull (no booze involved) like really bad. like "omg we totally left Jim at the club lol" bad. (we went back and got him. it was a bad night)

these things really hit different people very differently. I could drink half the world under the table and maintain my composure, but a whiff of energy drink and I'm a weeping screaming toddler.
posted by supermedusa at 1:11 PM on February 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

is this like that time a nyt journalist had an edible
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:38 PM on February 12, 2023 [35 favorites]

I did booze + energy drinks exactly one time and it hit me like if Adderall was MDMA.

I remember intently and euphorically watching a random CNN program and it felt like a religious experience.

Looks like it coulda been worse.

Also:

It tasted of the artificial tang of Smarties with a foreboding bitterness

That's Rockets for the Canadians in the audience.
posted by Reyturner at 1:52 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

My wife is a heavy drinker. The kind of 5'6" woman who can keep drinking until all the guys are under the table. One can of Four Loko fucked her up so badly she still talks about the bad decisions she made that night.
posted by gwydapllew at 1:55 PM on February 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

I guess every generation has their Four Loko. For me as a

late phase boomer here. We generally just skimmed through our dad's liquor cabinet, a little bit of everything merged together as something we'd call jungle juice (dubious word choice, I'm sorry). We'd gulp it down. We'd feel great, do stupid things, only occasionally end up left unconscious on somebody's lawn, or in a ditch.
posted by philip-random at 2:02 PM on February 12, 2023

I’m hardly a paragon of health or responsible behaviour, but one rule of thumb I’ve mostly adhered to over the years is not consuming stimulants and depressants at the same time (easier to do in Canada, where it’s illegal to mix alcohol and caffeine in a product).
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:07 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: fucked her up so badly she still talks about the bad decisions she made
posted by hippybear at 2:14 PM on February 12, 2023 [14 favorites]

is this like that time a nyt journalist had an edible

Interesting use of the word “journalist.”
posted by slogger at 2:16 PM on February 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

I usually like Jaya Saxena's writing, but this is a bit over-the-top. How much caffeine and alcohol was actually in the stuff?

A 23.5 oz can of Four Loko has 156 mg of caffeine. You might think, “Wow! What kind of caffeine-induced buzz is that going to get you?” About the same as in a small/tall (8 oz cup) Starbucks coffee (160 mg).
...
Of course, there’s also the alcohol. Four Loko is 12 percent alcohol by volume, which amounts to the equivalent of four to four-and-a-half typical American-style pilsner beers, such as Budweiser, Coors, and Miller, with approximate 4.8 to 5 ABV. Still, ounce for ounce, you get about 50 percent more caffeine and about the same amount of alcohol in a vodka and Red Bull cocktail (8.2 oz of Red Bull plus a 1.5 oz shot of 80 proof spirits). And you get about three times as much caffeine and about the same amount of alcohol in a cup of Irish coffee made by mixing a tall Starbucks coffee with a 1.5 oz shot of 80 proof spirits.

The post also notes, "many of the activist organizations intimately involved with the movement to ban [Four Loko-type drinks] (led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest) began this fight to regulate caffeine, long before there was an AED market, by attacking non-alcoholic energy drinks like Jolt Cola, Red Bull, Monster, and Rock Star. They’ve even been highly critical of Starbucks coffee for its caffeine content."

(of course, tolerance of caffeine and alcohol varies from individual, drink responsibly, do not taunt happy fun ball, &c.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:26 PM on February 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

A bit like philip-random, we used to skim a little off the top of every bottle in our collective parents' booze cupboard, honestly believing they wouldn't notice even though this is the twelfth time you've taken a skim off that bottle since they last took anything themselves.

I guess every generation has their thing and they all think they're just the coolest ever. We boomers know the truth, though.
posted by dg at 2:32 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

We boomers know the truth, though.

The nose knows.
posted by sjswitzer at 2:40 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Glenfiddich and cocaine.
posted by clavdivs at 2:54 PM on February 12, 2023 [20 favorites]

So I have heard.
posted by sjswitzer at 2:59 PM on February 12, 2023

I could never see any of the media pieces on Four Loko without thinking of this Newsradio bit from years earlier.

[Context of the gag - a pompous radio announcer is hired to promote an alcoholic product that uses exploitative marketing to target minorities. His offended co-worker convinces him to re-write the copy to be more "authentic".]
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:27 PM on February 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

This absolutely was a moral panic. Vodka red bulls were popular first, and stayed popular afterward. Vodka red bulls were for douchy college boys though, whereas Four Loko advertising had a "low class" feel, so it was easy to attack.
posted by agentofselection at 3:32 PM on February 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

Well, and you can't walk into a gas station and buy a vodka red bull. But you could come out with 25oz of Four Loko, maybe three if you had a hoodie with pockets.
posted by hippybear at 3:33 PM on February 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

A co-worker’s 18-year-old daughter drank Four Loko exclusively, declaring the stuff “easy to drink” and having “caffeine to keep you peppy.” She enjoyed several one afternoon in 2010 before offering to take the wheel of a 17-year-old friend’s car, insisting that she was fine. She hit another vehicle head-on at 85 mph, killing the friend and permanently disabling the driver of the other vehicle while she was uninjured but headed for prison.

Under questioning she insisted that she had no memory of anything about the drive at all. This is what immediately comes to mind when I think of Four Loko.
posted by kinnakeet at 3:40 PM on February 12, 2023 [18 favorites]

Glenfiddich and cocaine.

OK Soda and Zima. (Colloquially known as the “OK Boomer”)
posted by mubba at 3:44 PM on February 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm guessing a fair amount of the 'blackout in a can' actually comes from the can. They sell decent wine in 12oz cans around here and the first time I tried one I got upsettingly drunk because it felt like a beer can so I drank 12% wine like a 4.5% beer. Boones farm and jagerbombs (which I enjoyed very much in my youth) feel very different than just large can of alcohpop.
posted by Uncle at 4:13 PM on February 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

My parents offered me cigarettes at 12 when I was in jr. high, and beer and wine at 13. There was whiskey around and I remember how terrible it tasted, but I don’t recall any explicit permissions.

I thought all of it tasted absolutely awful and wanted no part of any of it.

From what I could glean from other kids' conversations at school, their parents weren’t doing stuff like that, but something held me back from sharing what mine were up to. I could do so many things other kids weren’t allowed to, but it didn’t feel like freedom to me, and I didn’t want people to know about it. School was like prison to me, but even if my parents hadn’t insisted that I go, and they did, I probably would have anyway because the loneliness of not going would have been too much to bear.
posted by jamjam at 4:24 PM on February 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

How much caffeine and alcohol was actually in the stuff?

The math in that article is completely bogus. First they say it’s the equivalent of almost 5 beers (true) but also somehow the same as a single shot of liquor (extremely false).

23.5oz at 12% abv is 4.7 standard drinks. Nobody is drinking an Irish coffee with 5 shots in it.

The real problem with 4 Loko is that it goes down like Hawaiian Punch so you want to drink a second one, by which time you’re blind drunk and also jacked up on sugar and caffeine.

I made the mistake — once — of spending a night drinking nothing but vodka Red Bulls. Halfway through the night I kept spilling my drinks because I was simultaneously fucked up and jittery.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:49 PM on February 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

Mad Dog, anyone? Mad Dog?

Keee-rist, that was awful.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 4:50 PM on February 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

The real problem with 4 Loko is that it goes down like Hawaiian Punch so you want to drink a second one, by which time you’re blind drunk and also jacked up on sugar and caffeine.


I used to buy these terrible 12% abv beers that had pictures of animals on them from the crummy corner store in the middle of nowhere, and the first one tasted so bad you had to force yourself to drink it. The second one, however, was divine, hahahaha.

In other news, all this comparison of 4loko to vodka redbull reminds me that I was drinking vodka redbull the last time I was punched in the face. It was probably 2002 or 2003, Wildwood New Jersey, outside of Jimmy's at 3am. I don't really remember all the details leading up to it, but there were definite bad decisions made.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:11 PM on February 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

I mean, if you have six of them you are gonna have A Night, but the article describes having a fraction of a can and then having Feelings, and it sounds to me like the placebo effect.

Yeah it's a lot of caffeine and alcohol and I think the same amounts would be a Bad Idea in any form.

But my suspicion is 4Loko is even more potent as an illustration of the fact that the effect of psychoactive drugs is powerfully mediated by their cultural reception. Anything that gives you a "buzz" -- a feeling that you interpret as meaning "the drug is working" -- is probably also going to channel your behavior in the direction it's "supposed" to go, according to available cultural scripts about the drug. I think alcohol in general disinhibits people partly just because the idea of disinhibition is self-realizing. If you think you're disinhibited, you view yourself as less responsible for your actions, which results in actual disinhibition on top of any direct pharmacological effect there might be. (The behavioral effects of alcohol are of course culturally mediated. Wait. Okay I'm starting to worry that I learned what I know about this from a Malcolm Gladwell article, recalibrating, recalibrating. Well at least it seems to be attested by some experts.)

But I don't discount the idea that caffeine can amplify the dangers of alcohol because it masks some of its effects, leading users to misjudge their intoxication.
posted by grobstein at 5:51 PM on February 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

Mad Dog, anyone? Mad Dog?

Yes! Terrible stuff. Like cough medicine spiked with grain alcohol.
posted by Liquidwolf at 6:14 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

My god. My then-roommate was a bartender and his place couldn’t move the stuff, so he brought it ALL home.

I’d never heard of it or its moral panic, but we had some not-often-seen friends in town that weekend and drank it all. That night is still spoken of as the drunkest any of us had ever been, before or since.
posted by hwyengr at 6:26 PM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Saint Scholastica Day riot, Feb. 10, 1355.
posted by clavdivs at 6:46 PM on February 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

Four Loko = Chaotic Evil in a can
posted by oneirodynia at 6:53 PM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade but ethanol is ethanol. The rush to ban Four Loko was a classic middle-class moral panic.

It was a alcoholic energy drink, not a speedball. There's no difference between drinking alcohol and caffeine that come in the same can, and alcohol and caffeine that come in a bottle that you add to the stuff in the can, as one does with vodka and Red Bull since whenever they started making Red Bull.

And yeah, the combination of caffeine and alcohol can be... a mixed bag, at best. I think every generation discovers this, like sex and sarcasm, in one format or another, and thinks they just made a unique discovery in human history.

You can get the same amount of fucked-up on espresso martinis (and I've seen Australians do that, by god) as you can on old-school pre-ban Four Loko, the martinis just cost more. And therein lies Four Loko's true crime: it was cheap and accessible to the wrong kind of people, and some people who drank it were seemingly quite comfortable letting themselves be the worst versions of themselves and blaming it on what they drank, rather than how much they drank or why they were drinking or who they were with, or maybe on just being generally shitty.

But "Four Loko will make you black out" makes about as much sense as the frat-bro 'logic'—beyond dispute when I was in college—that something in tequila makes normal people into wall-punching rage zombies. (Sure, Chad, it's not just your unresolved mommy issues and refusal to go to therapy, it's definitely gotta be the pesticide they use on the agave.) It's ethanol and caffeine. If you can't handle that, maybe don't drink it?
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:52 PM on February 12, 2023 [14 favorites]

How much do we know about the ingredients of Four Loko?

Because people's reactions to it are beyond what I’d expect from the ingredients we're aware of.

As far as I know the recipe for Coca Cola is still a secret, and I’m not sure energy drinks, even alcoholic energy drinks, would be held to a higher standard of disclosure.

There was a bit of a set-to years ago when it came out that RockStar* energy drink was owned by the son of unhinged conservative radio host Michael Savage, and Savage the Elder went ballistic claiming he had no connection to the drink.

Savage senior had a PhD in ethnobotany, and his thesis was based on exrtensive field work in Pacific Island countries. I recall reading that he participated in Kava ceremonies.

I no longer remember whether I came up with this or I read about it somewhere, but I thought senior's background raised a possibility there could have been Kava in RockStar*, which seemed like it would have been perfectly legal at the time.

And if RockStar* could do something like that, why not Four Logo?
posted by jamjam at 7:56 PM on February 12, 2023

I mean, if you have six of them you are gonna have A Night

Realistically, two is enough to turn out badly for most people. I’ve definitely seen somebody drink three. I’ve heard of somebody drinking four (the dreaded Sixteen Loko).
posted by atoxyl at 8:02 PM on February 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

After I posted my previous comment, it occurred to me the blackout stories and "One can of Four Loko fucked her up so badly she still talks about the bad decisions she made" made me think of what I've read about Rohypnol

When I googled "four loko rohypnol" this was the first result:

Did Four Loko Send Washington Students to the Hospital?

When a group of students from Central Washington University fell ill at a party and nine of them were rushed to the hospital earlier this month, doctors originally suspected the date rape drug, Rohypnol. Now investigators are looking at the alcoholic caffeine drink Four Loko.

posted by jamjam at 8:22 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

(the dreaded Sixteen Loko)

Because sometimes a Dozen Loko just doesn't seem like enough.
posted by hippybear at 8:23 PM on February 12, 2023

When I was in high school, it was Everclear and Tab.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:31 PM on February 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I'm a huge fan of alcohol and caffeine (Wait, Gen Z actually has a name for Mio and Vodka? Cute!) but the original Four Loko even hit me and my second hardest working liver in the galaxy differently than just about anything else, and I'm definitely not prone to placebo effect or leaning into excusing personal bad behavior because I did a couple of shots of Fireball.

I mean none of this is anything to brag about but I can happily sip neat vodka or even 120+ proof absinthe all night chased with water, coffee and/or Red Bull and that doesn't fuck me up like the original recipe for Four Loko did.

There's definitely something extra shitty about the combination of that much caffeine, sugar, cheap malt liquor, artificial flavorings and dyes or something that makes it hit like, well, getting smashed in the face with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

I mean I've never blacked out on the stuff because that just doesn't happen to me, but a 2-4 of those 20+ounce tallboy cans was definitely enough to get me walking around on rollerskates on an ice rink and seriously regretting and questioning my life choices and leave me with an outsized hangover usually reserved for more than a half a gallon of vodka after being at a desert rave all weekend.

Shoot, I had one of the caffeine free recipes a few months ago as a dumb impulse buy while on a group bike ride and just that one can was more than enough to make me regret everything and be generally unhappy about my decision making that evening.

I don't think it's really the caffeine that makes it so messed up and has everything to do with the massive sugar and cheap malt liquor bomb. One to three cans is like putting a few packs of Skittles into a few pints of Mad Dog or Bootlegger, drinking it through Twizzler straws and washing all of that down with a pound of Starburst and a handful of No Doz.

And if Four Loko mess me up like that I can barely imagine what it does to mere muggles.

Two or three of those things too quickly in the wrong hands must feel like waking up on the set of the Trailer Park Boys rolling around on the hash driveway and getting hit by bottle kids while wearing Ricky's old soiled track pants.
posted by loquacious at 8:38 PM on February 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

I swore off mixing highs in 1969 after tripping on acid in the park and in a fit of thirst, slurping down a half a bottle of Bali Hai a passing stranger offered me. Only time I vomited while tripping. (Hey I was 16. What did I know about cheap wine? Never drank cheap sweet wine again!1!1)
posted by a humble nudibranch at 9:30 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Came here for the BORG discourse. My college-freshperson step cousin called me old for thinking it might have any relation to Star Trek. To be fair I am old (enough to have just been legal drinking age during peak fourloko). The idea that preventing a hangover while getting totally shitfaced seems novel and I told her her generation seems smarter than we ever were. I mean I filled my share of Nalgene bottles with an unholy mix of 151 and boones farm without any consideration for the torture id endure the next morning.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 10:07 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Gen Z actually has a name for Mio and Vodka?

my aged understanding is the name applies only when it’s mixed in and consumed from a gallon jug (personal).
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 10:08 PM on February 12, 2023

Yeah, the effect described by the author of the article, which turns out towards the end to have been supposedly blacking out completely after having "a third of a can", is 100% placebo effect. It's the same thing that happens to kids who smoke oregano thinking it's weed or whatever. Positively, absolutely bullshit.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:48 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

My s/o and I decided we would be cringe and ok boomer, and we did the borg tonight for Superb Owl. Two gallons of spring water, Bacardi, macerated banana, Tang, Arizona tea concentrate, powdered Starbucks, clove, cinnamon, Liquid IV. It tasted fine, it was just a chore to get through. Now we are well-hydrated balloons begging our kidneys to let us return to homeostasis, and hoping the powdered vitamins don't clog our ductwork.

What I'm saying is, the line must be drawn here, no further.
posted by credulous at 11:00 PM on February 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

something that makes it hit like, well, getting smashed in the face with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
Well, the ingredients are different, but the effect of Four Loko and a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster seem not entirely dissimilar if these reports are to be believed.
posted by dg at 11:36 PM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

is 100% placebo effect. It's the same thing that happens to kids who smoke oregano thinking it's weed or whatever. Positively, absolutely bullshit.

Three experiences immediately come to mind that make me dispute this. One involved (non) LSD, another (non) magic mushrooms, the third (non) marijuana. I failed to get even slightly high every time. Maybe I'm just the kind of person who fails the placebo or maybe there's a little bullshit there as well.
posted by philip-random at 11:45 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

... I'm so glad I quit drinking.
According to Wikipedia, Marketed as a "premium malt beverage" in cherry and berry flavors, the (original formulation of the) drink contained taurine, guarana, caffeine and wormwood—the supposed psychoactive ingredient of absinthe.[6]

Makes my liver, brain and soul ache just reading.
posted by From Bklyn at 3:46 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade but ethanol is ethanol. The rush to ban Four Loko was a classic middle-class moral panic.

I think the second thing can be true regardless. But I'd like to interrogate that first claim. chemistry is not always straightforward (see the vast and nuanced claims about how different calories interact with your body).

I've 'sampled' a wide variety of alcoholic and caffeine products and 'recipes'. The feel and results of consuming Four Loco were different to me. I wasn't a high school / college neophyte when this evaluation was made. It could absolutely be situational evidence, but I think it's more complicated than is being represented in the above.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 5:26 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I guess every generation has their Four Loko. For me as a Gen X high schooler around 1990, we had the diabolically strong wine cooler impersonator Cisco.

Yeah Cisco was a legendary drink back in the late 80s/early 90s. I think I drank about a cupful of it and thankfully I found it pretty nasty. Drink of choice for more than a few of my friends, though.
posted by zardoz at 5:30 AM on February 13, 2023

Princess Carolyn: "Booooojack! I brought Four Loko! I brought *four* Four Lokos. That's Sixteen Lokos!

Bojack: "Finally someone brings me an adequate number of Lokos!"
posted by mrjohnmuller at 5:35 AM on February 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

From 2018: Quebec man dies after mixing four cans of Four Loko, a Smirnoff cooler and two acetaminophen pills
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:28 AM on February 13, 2023

I am totally willing to believe that there's something in there that has a multiplier effect, honestly. I am not a huge drinker (...anymore. there was a four-month period in my 20s...) but I have dedicated decades of my life to the intensive study of energy drinks and there is definitely shit they put in them that has different effects on different people. (An old coworker of mine discovered the hard way that guarana turns her into a ragemonster. Another developed a near-fatal allergy to synthetic taurine.) I just want to know what it is!
posted by restless_nomad at 7:11 AM on February 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I drank a number of Four Lokos in my day (as well as the pre-Loko "Four"s which no one ever seems to discuss), and I cannot say I ever experienced any effects other than what one would expect from consuming that amount of alcohol and caffeine in combination.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 7:27 AM on February 13, 2023

The wormwood thing is BS, too. Remember when absinthe came back on the market? Oooh, magical. It's booze with herbal flavoring. Like gin, just different herbs. Oh, plus sugar.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:34 AM on February 13, 2023

Ah, good old blackout juice...
I remember a backyard firepit party where my spouse drunkenly encountered FourLoko for the first time and mispronounced it "Fower Loko."
posted by schyler523 at 9:05 AM on February 13, 2023

Remember when absinthe came back on the market? Oooh, magical.

as I recall, the stuff that first made it to my part of the Americas wasn't exactly the same concoction that you could get in parts of Europe. I do know that the bottle a friend brought back from Prague got me enthusiastically singing along to countrified versions of disco hits from the 70s. Which had never happened before ... and hasn't since.

Kind of like this but much drunker.
posted by philip-random at 9:29 AM on February 13, 2023

Interesting use of the word “journalist.”

i was a little fucked up on four loko sorry
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:33 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I do know that the bottle a friend brought back from Prague got me enthusiastically singing along to countrified versions of disco hits from the 70s.

Earwormwood?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:08 PM on February 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

When it says that it has guarana and caffeine, it makes me wonder if the total caffeine level is even higher than reported, because most of what makes you feel something from guarana is that it is so high in caffeine.
posted by umbú at 8:32 PM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

I knew a bunch of bonkers punks from Northern Vermont who used to rate things on the "Loco Scale". Ranging from "I'm only about a quarter loco" to "Oh shit, frank was at least Ocho Loco last night!".
posted by TheCoug at 7:52 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I never drank too many 4 Locos, but I never liked the X mixed with Red Bull drinks because they wouldn't allow me to black out, they made me lay and vibrate in bed after the night was over. I'd rather black out than that! It's 4am and I have to be at work at 7:00! Let me sleep a bit!
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:16 AM on February 15, 2023

I've never tried Four Loko, but years ago, my partner and I once accidently mixed Boone's Farm Margarita-flavored fortified wine with tequila (the Boone's totally looked like a mixer) and enjoyed the feeling so much after one each, we had another! Oh, our aching heads the next day. Our folly became evident in the too bright light of day.
posted by but no cigar at 3:21 PM on February 15, 2023

Four Loko adjacent, I just had a memory that back in the 90s we used to buy trucker speed (ephedrine?) and use them before and while drinking, which I would say led to bad outcomes except those bad outcomes were really inevitable and the pills only sped up the process - pardon the pun.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:29 AM on March 6, 2023