Caffeine - The Last Socially Acceptable Drug?

Alcohol used to be a socially acceptable drug, but it’s been getting a bit of a bad rap lately, what with coward punches, lockouts and those government ad campaigns reminding you that by 3am you’ll be slumped in a Kings Cross gutter with your kickers in the air.

Caffeine on the other hand seems to tick all the boxes.  It’ll liven you up just enough for any occasion, while still keeping you capable of driving a car and making positive life choices.  Caffeine is so socially acceptable that your grandmother invites you round to drink it, your boss provides it free of charge in the workplace kitchen and there’s a whole festival dedicated to it in The Rocks each year. [Click link below to read more....]

Sure, tea and coffee are available in decaffeinated varieties but that’s like saying your local pub exists because people like to sit in a communal area and drink lemonade.  Our love affair with tea and coffee all stems from that magic ingredient – caffeine.

I recently discovered, accidently, in a dodgy little convenience store, caffeine in melt-in-the mouth little strips – like those little breath freshener strips that were briefly popular a few years ago.  I’m keen as to try my little caffeine strips, maybe while I’m out for a long run.  I thought this would be my dirty little secret, until...  the Sydney Morning Herald published an article recommending caffeine for runners!  Now, I don’t agree with everything in the SMH article, but I’ll quote it to validate my own skewed logic when it suits me.

According to the SMH, any kind of caffeinated cr@p seems to be OK for runners, including good old No-Doz and, umm, caffeinated marshmallows? A bit of googling tells me the marshmallows may actually have been discontinued, sent quietly off to the naughty corner with other short-lived caffeinated marketing gimmicks such as CC’s Cheese Energy Corn Chips and Snickers Charged.

So it would seem, we turn our noses up at caffeine marketed in a cheap and tacky form, but we love our caffeine when it’s sold with a high price tag and a glamorous image.  Enter George Clooney and his Nespresso machine.

Wow Nestle got this one right didn’t they?  Just as the world was about to realise that coffee was a naughty thing, Nespresso came along and made it so desirable that you forgot to check if that new flavour was decaf or not and lo, overnight you developed a new repeat buying habit.

Coffee is big business in Sydney - part of the CBD eco-system in fact.  Every office building has at least one coffee place either within its walls or positioned strategically nearby, catering to your every coffee occasion from breakfast, to informal meetings, to that bitching sesh that you just couldn’t conduct within company walls. 

So what was my point? Ah yeah. I like Red Bull (and coffee, and tea), in fact I like it a lot and if I don’t guzzle some sort of caffeine within a few hours of waking, I’ll be all sorts of fuzzy and headachy by early afternoon.  So in fact it seems I’ve got an addiction, and one day or another in the future I should probably make it stop.  In the meantime, I still want to see what happens when I eat these:

Image Credit (top): http://www.123rf.com/profile_ivaleksa
Image credit (right): revviesenergy.com

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