Why Caffeinated Alcoholic Drinks Are Banned In America

The Takeout
By Joe Hoeffner
July 6, 2025

For better or worse, America is pretty lax about what you can or can’t consume. While countries like the United Kingdom will wring their hands and place taxes on anything that might be slightly unhealthy, America’s policy can be mostly summed up as “YOLO.” Who says you can’t buy a soda the size of a fire hydrant? This is America! You can do whatever you please, so long as you have the money. So when the FDA sticks its neck out and makes a point to ban something, it’s enough to make you raise your eyebrows. Case in point: the FDA ban on caffeinated alcoholic beverages, which went into effect in 2010 due to concerns about the safety of drinks like Four Loko and Joose.

In those heady days before the ban, a can of Four Loko might have contained three coffee cups’ worth of caffeine and four beers’ worth of alcohol – a truly bonkers combination that was predictably irresistible to party-hardy college students. Four Loko, as well as similar brands, leaned into this trend by introducing an assortment of sugar-rush flavors, such as Sour Apple and Blue Razz, and branding themselves as punky and youth-friendly. It’s basically the same playbook energy drink and vape companies use today – except, somehow, these drinks were even worse for you.

Caffeine and alcohol is a dangerous combination

It turns out that when you mix caffeine and alcohol, it brings out the worst of both worlds. In their 2015-2020 dietary guidelines, the FDA warned that, by drinking alcohol with caffeine, the consumer may end up drinking a lot more than they otherwise might. It results in a state called being “wide awake drunk,” where those who drink have no real idea how drunk they actually are. For many reasons, this is not ideal when you’re drinking, and it increases the risk of other kinds of bad behavior.

In 2010, the FDA told the companies that made these beverages that they couldn’t keep selling them in their current form. (Other kinds of alcoholic beverages that naturally contain caffeine, like Duff Goldman’s favorite coffee liqueur Kahlua, weren’t affected.) From there, changes were made, with Four Loko putting out a new version of their drink without the caffeine, and a black market quickly developed around the full-caffeine version of the drinks. The history of Four Loko, once infamous for its insane, drunken, and wild reputation, became a little less insane and wild. College kids still drink, of course, but it’s not quite as easy to get “wide awake drunk”. It turns out that, by putting regulations into place and enforcing them (as when the nascent FDA regulated filthy meatpacking plants), good things can happen. Who knew?