If I still drank, I'd be pretty bummed that Four Loko was being taken off the market. For a young burgeoning drunk in the mid-oughties, energy-infused malt liquors seemed to be the most interesting development in alcohol since. . . well, man first crushed grapes. At no point in its history has the sublime kick of booze been augmented. I spent about eight good years solely devoted to task of discovering what the quintessence of being drunk is, and I submit my findings thusly:


"It makes people wanna commit incest."

Of course, we've spent milleniae attributing a Willy Wonka grimoire of different psychoactive qualities to different distillations of what is simply a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules:

"Tequila makes you feisty." "Vodka is friendly." "Beer calms you down." "Jagermeister is liquid cocaine." "Pernod makes you hallucinate." "Scotch is nostalgic" "Whisky is spiritual" ad infinitum.
In truth, Sparks Energy malt liquor, with its tangy mix of guarana, taurine, Siberian ginseng, and caffeine, was the only beverage that actually delivered on it's promise of being a different headkick.
I remember one hot July Summer night in Chicago back in 2006, there was an outdoor concert, Intonation Fest, sponsored by Sparks and Vice Magazine. At the concession stand, a twelve ounce beer was $5 while a sixteen ounce Sparks was $4, so, you know, do the math. It was a ginormous amount of people in the dead heat and the entire body politic was hepped on energy booze. As the Boredoms began playing their catastrophic drum set, I remember a mania and insanity coursing through the audience like a Bill Haley and the Comets concert behind the Iron Curtain. The potential for bedlam was everywhere. By the time Ghostface Killah mounted the stage, the thousands of us had melted like ice cream into a sweaty, flesh-walled slurry of hemmorhaging pheromones. We were a stupid bull cow, like Katja Kassin being finished by a purple-polychrome centipede dildo courtesy of the mandingus general.
Suffice to say, the stuff was poison, but I ain't forgetting such days anytime soon.
I feel old as I actually find myself supporting the ban of a substance. Me, the libertarian who believes every home ought to have a marijuana crop protected by Smith & Wesson actually in favor of banning a substance or at least suing the bastards. Why? Because with its fluorescent urban camo can, I think you're marketing it to kids. It has the same wacky can that appeals to those in love with the acrylic, epoxy-gooey world of toy guns and Nerf. I'm sure the manufacturers were targeting frat boys and guys from New Jersey, and it's no fault of the manufacturers that douchebags are into the same color schemes little kids are into. .
I think of the way I drank when I was 19, and I'm sure I would have been the kid whose heart exploded on this stuff. The problem lies in that alcohol is the only thing substance that, for whatever reason, one occasionally drinks twelve of, without intention to. It's a trucker's speedball.
So, I say, take it off the market as a alco-pop and re-introduce it under a brand name geared towards men in their early thirties. Dress it up. Have Ralph Steadman design the label and emboss David Foster Wallace's suicide letter scrawled in tortured longhand along the sweet gleaming lip of the bottle. . . Give it a puzzling brand name like "Quantum of Chappaquidick." Then I'll buy it.