GoKawiilOn a winter morning in a Long Island town about two hours east of New York City’s skyscrapers, a Dutch researcher told local officials that their concerns about mixing heavily caffeinated energy drinks with alcohol were overblown.
A few months earlier, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had effectively banned Four Loko, a caffeinated malt liquor dubbed “blackout in a can” by college students. Suburban Suffolk County was now considering something more sweeping: a ban on selling energy drinks to minors.
Joris Verster, an academic from Utrecht University, said there was no scientific basis for the law. Though booze and energy drinks are often consumed together, Verster argued that beverages like Red Bull aren’t to blame for bad things that happen when people get drunk.
He offered an analogy that might resonate with locals; Suffolk County includes the beach towns that inspired the thriller “Jaws.” Blaming energy drinks for binge drinking and alcohol-fueled injuries, he said, would be like blaming shark attacks on summertime ice cream sales.
“The shark attacks are not caused by the ice cream sales,” Verster said in the February 2011 hearing.
He was one of three scientists who had crossed the Atlantic to urge officials to drop the proposal. The others were a British professor and Red Bull’s chief scientific officer. The trio shared more than a research interest: Through paychecks or research grants, all three had gotten money from Red Bull, the world’s largest energy drink company.
Their argument won the day. Lawmakers dropped the age limit, marking an early victory for the Austria-based company in what would become a global campaign to use science to combat restrictions on its products.
For more than a decade, Red Bull paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for university professors to conduct research that has been favorable to the energy drink industry, a joint investigation involving The Examination, The Bristol Cable, Daraj, Investico, Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel, Der Standard, STAT and the Toronto Star found. The company has flown academics to U.S. cities and provided talking points for meetings with government officials who were considering restrictions on energy drinks. It funded a doctorate for a researcher in the United Kingdom and another in the Netherlands.
In the United States and Canada, research backed by Red Bull or conducted by academics with financial ties to the company has been used to defeat measures such as age restrictions and warning labels.
A pivotal report by a European food agency in 2015 cited these studies in finding that there wasn’t clear evidence that mixing energy drinks and alcohol was harmful. That report remains the last word in Europe and has been used to prevent action elsewhere.
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