Going Crazy Over Four Loko?

[Kimmik]

My problem with the energy/alcoholic drinks are this... they are aimed at college student... Lets be honest many of the college crowd do really stupid shit to get into Frats and sororities. People have drank themselves to death.. be it with water or alcohol.

Getting a jagerbomb *personally i wont ever touch jager... bad juju* at a bar makes sure that the imbiber is in fact 21. Sadly the trend is that more often then we would wish they end up in the hands of the under 21 crowd.

[Lace Neil Singer]

I drank alcohol before I was eighteen (I'm English, just a reminder) cuz my parents let me drink it. Which took all the fun out of drinking, which was their intention.

I also once drank ten vodka red bulls and survived. I wouldn't recommend it, tho.

Also, this smacks of the nanny state. Why should the rest of us be deprived, just cuz a few kids are getting hold of this drink? (Note: I wouldn't touch it myself, cuz it sounds disgusting to me; Red Bull is the only energy drink I can stomach). Kids get hold of lots of things that can harm them; like for instance, glue. Shall we go all kneejerk and ban glue, then?

[AdminAssistant]

My problem with the energy/alcoholic drinks are this... they are aimed at college student... Lets be honest many of the college crowd do really stupid shit to get into Frats and sororities. People have drank themselves to death.. be it with water or alcohol.

Then the problem is with the students and the frats and sororities (another rant), not the makers of Four Loko. People under 21 aren't supposed to drink. Of course they do...I did. But that isn't the company's fault.

[Andara Bledin]

The "think about the children!" thing made me LOL. You're supposed to be 21 if you drink. TWENTY-ONE. NOT A CHILD. Sheesh, do they even think before they start spouting off about this?

Oh, they think all right.

Cry "abuse" and peaople start grabbing the pitchforks. Cry "what about the children" and the same exact thing happens, but from a slightly different demographic.

There are more than enough people out there who vote who couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag, and even more scary, don't even want to take the effort to even try.

Wow. THat magical label of must be 21 to drink has completely and utterly prevented all people under 21 from even sipping a can of beer.

And how is making the drinks not legal to serve going to stop underaged kids from doing it any better than the legal drinking age laws do now?

I'm really getting tired of the government enacting laws to restrict my freedoms because the rest of the nation is so insulated as children that they don't have the sense to not get themselves killed when they leave the nest.

My problem with the energy/alcoholic drinks are this... they are aimed at college student... Lets be honest many of the college crowd do really stupid shit to get into Frats and sororities. People have drank themselves to death.. be it with water or alcohol.

Then we need to levy the blame where it really lies, not with the tools they use to Darwin themselves out of the gene pool.

Their parents.

It's the trend towards helicopter parents and raising kids in these antiseptic safe little bubbles that leads to college kids, out of the nest for the first time, to have no reasonable sense of restraint.

The worst part is that it isn't the kids' fault, but they're the ones getting hurt, and the rest of the nation is getting caught in the blast, while the parents responsible for the entire mess get to play victim.

^-.-^

[AdminAssistant]

I wouldn't put all the blame on the parents. At 18, the kids are responsible for themselves. They aren't forced to join a frat, and while lots of drinking goes on outside of Greek "philanthropic organizations" there won't be as much pressure to binge drink on a regular basis. The kids need to be held responsible for their actions.

[Greenday]

The kids need to be held responsible for their actions.

This. The alcohol company did not give the kids alcohol. They bought it. Either from a friend or using a fake ID or just going to a liqour store that doesn't ID. Freshmen, especially ones joining frats, having been drinking themselves to death every year. This just happens to be the popular drink right now so it's the one catching flak.

Kids need to know/learn their limits. We making drinking into such a taboo thing that these upon entering a frat or something, they'll be dumb enough to just chug alcohol without knowing when to stop. My friend who went to college in DC told me about how two of the three frats lost their charters. One lost it for hazing, the other because they made the kids drink themselves until they went to the hospital and one died. They need to realize it's okay to say "NO". My friend's frat is the only one left and does ZERO hazing. That's respect.

[AdminAssistant]

Well, I wish the whole frat thing would go out of business myself, but it's good to see that some colleges are taking action when necessary, forcing frats to be more responsible. But, yeah. You've got to learn how to drink responsibly, to know your limit, and to know when to stop or go home.

[Andara Bledin]

I wouldn't put all the blame on the parents. At 18, the kids are responsible for themselves.

I would.

I married a guy whose mother did everything for him until he hit his 18th birthday and then expected him to magically know how to do everything for himself and have the self-control and willpower that she never gave him the chance to develop to do it.

As you can imagine, that didn't work out so well. It took me years to get him to stop lying to me about testing his blood sugar (type I diabetic), and he still ended up in the hospital a couple of times after we broke up. He also destroyed the engine of his car because it was easier to lie to me about checking the oil than actually checking the oil. And I think that he was just starting to figure out how not to spend the money that was in the account but already spent with checks. We were together for 10 years.

So, yes, I can entirely blame the parents in such scenarios. They don't teach their children to be responsible for themselves; they teach them to be dependent upon them and the kids end up completely unprepared to deal with life on their own.

^-.-^

[Greenday]

You can teach kids to be responsible for themselves, but in the end, they have to do it for theirself.

My mom taught me to learn my limits when I was younger. I drank before I was 21. I learned to respect alcohol. Have I puked from drinking before? LOL Yes. That doesn't make it my mom's fault.

You can tell a kid to do something multiple times, but they have to make the decisions, not the parents.

[blas87]

Very right, you are, Andara.

Helicopter and Enabler parents are usually just as much to blame as the overgrown children parading as adults.

[Andara Bledin]

As an addendum to my earlier post about parents being the root of the problem, I do believe there's a point where it becomes more and more the fault of the person not learning. For the most part, any 30-year-old that's been on their own for most of their adult life really should have had enough time to get their own act together.

When we first got together, it was his mother's fault. By the time we split up, anything still a problem was his own.

^-.-^

[Greenday]

You know, maybe the first time someone screws up, depending on what it is, I could see blaming the parent. Washing clothes, dishes, cleaning, car maintanence, etc. But after you screw up once, you have no right to blame anyone else. You saw the results of screwing up the first time, you should have learned from that experience.

[Andara Bledin]

If you don't understand the relationship between cause and effect, either from never being the cause or never seeing the effect, it takes more than a single instance to know that one is related to the other.

And even then, it takes at least two iterations to be able to determine that the first wasn't a statistical fluke.

^-.-^

[Greenday]

That really only applies to the most basic of stuff. In the 21st century, there is a multitude of sources available for information on different things. Like why an oil change is important or checking blood sugar or drinking or drugs.

[Andara Bledin]

Oh, yes, because none of us ever made the same mistakes our parents made.

Sure, we can know something intellectually, but it's not the same as experience.

Take this as an example: When I was young, I tried to smoke a cigarette, once. I already knew they were bad for your health, I knew they smelled nasty, I knew they were expensive, and I knew that they made my mother and aunt cough a lot. But I still tried one for myself, because none of what I knew mattered until I had some sort of experience for myself.

^-.-^