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The focus kind of came more like the pornography definition: You know it when you see it. So we had to have conversations about what we all knew was the problem that policymakers had, and without putting a statutory definition in.
Most of the people who were using this product or abusing this product were young. It was clearly marketed to young people. Harris : Conference call, after conference call, after conference call, then individual calls and sidebar calls. Emailing back and forth, you know. It was like the end of session for me, but it was a November day, a hour Saturday. Rosen: This agreement came out as a result of an all-day meeting at my office on a Saturday.
I did not want to go home that weekend knowing this issue had not been taken care of. Freeman: There were a lot of conference calls, and a lot of information passed, but that process was very straightforward, and they did it in an efficient way. Harris : I had to get gas that day, and I was going to go grab a soda and I noticed Four Lokos that were there. I actually bought one to have while I was having the conversation. I bought a watermelon Four Loko, just one of them.
Rosen: You know, the beer wholesalers and distributors were making good money selling this stuff, and I tried to impress upon them the reasons for my concern. Basically we reached a voluntary agreement where they agreed to stop buying the product immediately, and then I gave them some very limited period of time in which they could sell off the product that they had in their warehouses.
That was my way of not clubbing them to death on this thing and adding to their pile. I think there was a lot of misinformation about it.
We knew we had consumers, employees, and we had a brand. On November 14, , the New York State Liquor Authority announced that they had come to a voluntary agreement with the manufacturers of Four Loko to stop the shipment of the malt beverage into New York state. The distributors agreed to stop selling their existing stock after December Three days later, the U. Food and Drug Administration issued an official warning about alcoholic energy drinks. Wright: Selling it on eBay.
Freeman: Yeah, people were buying 20 cases at the time. They were bum-rushing the bodegas — mass hysteria. The Fat Jew : Before, it was beautiful, questionable-decision juice.
Now, they were threatening to make it almost an urban legend. Were you never going to be able to get it again? It felt like this was our drink, it was the drink of a certain age and a certain generation. I had my duffel bag and went to the liquor store and bought a bunch off the shelf and stacked them up.
Am I going to wake up? Watts : The vigil was awesome. People, they had candles out, it was in Union Square, and they did Beatles cover songs about Four Loko. It had turned into Four Loko prohibition. He was hoarding it in his basement in Brooklyn, trying to get his hands on as much of it as possible, and it became something you almost had to have. Eddie Huang, author, TV host, and restaurateur : I just got mad and started stockpiling original Four Loko when I heard they had to change the formula.
I told my brother if one of us got married we would make a Four Loko fountain and serve it like Champagne at the reception. There are tales of accidental nude break-ins and hallucinations attributed to Four Loko. But the fun couldn't last. Colleges across the country began banning Four Loko after student hospitalizations were connected to the drink. Felix Ortiz, New York State assemblyman, introduced legislation to ban Four Loko and other caffeinated alcoholic drinks in his state in the fall of But with several lawsuits pending against them and the FTC threat looming, the creators of Four Loko got out ahead of the trouble and announced , on November 17, , that they would be removing the caffeine, taurine, and guarana from their recipe.
New Yorkers took to Union Square to mourn. But the inventory that was already out in the world when the ban was announced New York University students bought entire bodega stocks to resell to friends; cases were going for unheard of prices on eBay and Craigslist. It was Prohibition all over again. Eventually, the black market well dried up, and all that we're left with today, ten years later, is a sickly sweet, high ABV, caffeine-free drink in a camo tall boy can. My brother, who was born in and currently goes to university in Ontario, Canada, where Four Loko was never legal in the first place, knows exactly what it is when I ask.
Its reputation has outlived its actual effects by a decade. Was the original Four Loko really that destructive, or was it the fact it was only available for a short, blackout blip in time, that cemented it into urban legend? The young adults of today may never know.
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