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FDA Bans Pure Bulk Caffeine Products, Citing "significant Public Health Concern"
Companies can no longer sell bulk packages of liquid or powdered caffeine directly to consumers, the Food and Drug Administration announced Friday. The policy will take immediate effect "given the significant public health concern," according to the agency's statement released Friday. "Highly concentrated and pure caffeine, often sold in bulk packages, have been linked to at least two deaths in otherwise healthy individuals," the agency stated.
[...] In small doses, if you're otherwise healthy, caffeine shouldn't kill you. But part of the issue is that highly concentrated caffeine looks nothing like the kinds of caffeinated products we're used to seeing. Instead, it can look like water if it's in a liquid form or sugar if it's powdered. "The consequences of a consumer mistakenly confusing one of these products could be toxic or even lethal," the agency stated.
[...] Between 10 and 14 grams of caffeine is considered life-threatening, according to the FDA's guidelines, though people can have an irregular or rapid heart rate and seizures after taking just a gram. The amount of concentrated caffeine that's considered safe at a time—200 milligrams—is very, very small.
Also at Bloomberg.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:13AM (17 children)
I'm OK with the FDA banning this substance for direct consumer sale. It fits well within their mandate, and is entirely consistent with the regulation of thousands of other drugs which can't be sold direct to consumers either.
I think we all recognize that there is a huge risk in using such highly concentrated products at a consumer level. My first thought went to drink spiking (for harm, not sexy times) - how easy would it be to seriously mess someone up with this?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:34AM (11 children)
Please, you can easily taste caffeine and very likely judge the concentration to within a hundred milligrams per cup. Don't believe me? Try using half decaf half regular in the office coffee pot some morning.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:02AM (6 children)
Decaf coffee from the supermarket tastes like shit because of how it has been decaffeinated. The difference in taste is all the chemicals they've used to strip not just caffein, but most of the flavour from the coffee.
There are some decaffeinated coffees (1/10th the caffein of a normal coffee) that taste better and stronger than lower quality coffees with more caffein in them. So I'm not sure it's obvious from taste alone.
However, the issue you're replying to is a faulty assumption anyway. The purpose isn't to stop malicious use of a chemical to poison someone - that can be done in any number of ways using other saleable opened capsules, tablets, liquids, powders, etc. The issue is that it is too easy to accidentally poison yourself or someone else because of the way the product is presented to a consumer - especially when a teaspoon of something that looks otherwise innocuous can kill you. Same applies to selling poisonous substances in bottles that look like water or other typical drinking bottles.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:14AM (4 children)
The point was, you can taste caffeine. Don't believe me? Put as little as 50mg in a cup of water then do the Pepsi Challenge with an ordinary cup of water.
It's easy to accidentally kill yourself millions of ways if you're bloody stupid. That's no reason to make life shitty for those of us aren't.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:20AM (3 children)
In a neutral and relatively consistent tasting solution like water you might be able to taste it. But, add it some overly flavoured sugar drink, smoothie, or alcoholic beverage, and the odds that you'll recognise it as poisonous reduce dramatically. You might still taste it, but will you think it tastes bad/wrong/poisonous enough to avoid drinking it. Same goes for methanol in drinks, you can surely taste it in water, but in a cocktail you just assume its part of the flavour and end up in hospital with a risk of permanent eye damage.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @11:01AM (2 children)
In normal concentrations, you're still wrong. My tongue can spot 50mg of caffeine in twelve ounces of pretty much anything.
In lethal concentrations, you're astoundingly wrong. It would taste quite terrible in anything weaker tasting than drain cleaner. We're talking multiple grams instead of tens or hundreds of milligrams.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:03PM (1 child)
I'm glad to know that TMB's sense of taste is considered the standard across all human beings.
People regularly do much stupider things than downing an overly bitter self-made energy drink.
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:45PM
True, and the species is better off for it. Intense stupidity is not a valuable species survival trait last I checked.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:06AM
...because of how it has been decaffeinated
Methylene Chloride or Ethyl Acetate?
There are other methods to do the task. [littlecoffeeplace.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:03AM (3 children)
The problem is, in super concentrated form, when you taste it, you will have easily swallowed a large dose already. It's too late then. Coffee is to ultrapure caffeine as light beer is to Everclear.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:18AM (2 children)
In a super concentrated form, you'd never swallow it to begin with unless you're bucking for a Darwin Award. It does not taste good in high concentrations. It in fact tastes quite terrible. Regardless, I'm utterly unconcerned if people want to go putting chemicals in things they plan to consume without knowing what the fatal doses of said chemicals are. It's not difficult to look up, so the only explanation they have is utter stupidity.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:59AM (1 child)
But won't you think of the children?!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @11:02AM
Fuck no I won't. Not letting your children drink poison isn't even parenting 101; it's the shit you should take as a given before you even show up to parenting 101.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:32AM (4 children)
You are the reason we are a dying society. Yes you. You personally.
A lot of stuff is dangerous and can kill you. It all used to be quite legal, sold over the counter and very few people died. Did you know you used to could go into a feed store or a hardware store and just buy a few sticks of dynamite? Folks used it to blow up stumps and other mundane uses. No government lists, no special licenses, you could just go in, grab a few sticks and walk over to the cash register and buy it. Just hearing that tale probably makes you want your snuggie and a safe place to cry. Most of the nastiest drugs we now fight the "War on some drugs" over used to be sold over the counter and fewer people per-capita were dying of overdoses. Dodge City's worst year was a lot safer then our nation's capital is now with an almost total ban on bearing arms and lets not even discuss the real shithole cities, all with gun bans.
But you know what really pisses me off? My grandchildren shall never know the joy of a real chemistry set, because you can't buy them anymore. That is entirely on you. YOU are helping fuck up my grandchildren's future.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:53PM
Agreed. That's where the DIY movement comes in, I think. Being able to manipulate matter is our birthright as humans. When they take that away it is a direct assault on who we are.
I want us to travel in a different direction as a global culture from the one we've been headed in, where we're all squeezed into ever tighter boxes for the control and benefit of a very few. Teaching us to be helpless and dependent from cradle to grave is abject tyranny. Instead, I want us all to play with real chemistry sets and work with power tools and how to build and design the things around us in our material culture, because what we build and do is the expression of the human spirit, and that is the greatest resource mankind has, not oil, not diamonds, not land.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:05PM
do what any other red-blooded american does -- break the law and claim ignorance of it when caught.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:32PM
I have very little argument with that. Other than the concerns that there are bad people who do bad things. But that has always been true. I would propose that certain bad things should be kept out of the hands of certain bad people. But that idea never seems to get very far. Even if it is a sincere attempt at not taking away everyone's guns, explosives and chemistry sets. (I enjoyed 3 chem sets as a kid. And other dangerous things like CRTs removed from trashed TVs, and other scary things.)
I would be more worried about climate change than chemistry sets.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:12PM
I would like to see a citation for "very few people died", possibly modified as "very few people injured". The human IQ distribution hasn't shifted all that much, and seeing how stupid many people are today, I find it dubious that "very few people died". You also need to account for the fact that there was a lot fewer people overall.
I don't entirely disagree with you, especially now that the Internet exists where even someone who doesn't know how to use X can reasonably obtain the knowledge to do so. However, I am human and suffer no delusions about my own human fallibility.
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