Caffeine

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Our secret stash of

Drugs

Icon drugs.svg
Highs and lows
Nitrogen ("N") means it plays with your head.

Caffeine, is a drug from the Rubiaceae family of flowering plants. It's a drug without which 99% of its users would be completely and utterly unable to complete the simplest of tasks. Caffeine acts as a powerful central nervous system stimulant. Emphasis on the word "nervous". It is found naturally in coffee, many teas, and chocolate and is an ingredient in cola drinks soda pop and many sport drinks. It is also an incredibly deadly poison; if you happen to be an insect (which is why plants evolved to produce it).

Contents

[edit] Legal status

The powers that be have deemed caffeine unworthy of the lavish attention they give to other drugs. The reason for this is unclear but it could have something to do with them having to throw about 98% of the population in prison if they did. Not that the U.S. hasn't tried something like that before. Of course, it could just be the fact that it doesn't cause people to go into homicidal rages and, while not impossible, is exceedingly difficult for most people to overdose on.

[edit] Energy drinks

Because people are increasingly lazy, so lazy as to think even instant coffee is too much hassle,[1] caffeine has become more popular as an "energy drink" or pill. Tablets such as ProPlus and drinks like Relentless and Red Bull contain concentrated caffeine and sugar. Combined, these make people go, more or less, totally mental for an hour before crashing.

A popular craze with these is to mix them with alcohol such as vodka or tequila, and some drinks manufacturers have latched onto this by producing alcoholic energy drinks. It is often claimed that this caffeine-alcohol combination makes getting drunk more exciting, or even dangerous (a reputation that other caffeinated alcoholic beverages such as Irish Coffee have somehow never earned). Due to these concerns, along with the popularity of these drinks with underage drinkers, pre-manufactured alcoholic energy drinks are now effectively banned in the USA.

[edit] Just drink it!

In a large study (reported in 2012 in the New England Journal of Medicine) of 402,260 participants, unlikely to be superseded by another coffee study anytime soon, it was found that people who drank more than 2 cups of coffee/day were 10-16% less likely to have died than nondrinkers during a 13.6 year period.[2]

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Or perhaps they just don't like the taste of coffee -- which makes you wonder how they can tolerate the flavor of some of those energy drinks.
  2. Coffee gives jolt to life span
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support