To the severe dismay of all Philadelphia’s broke squatter fixie-riding pseudo punks, Four LOKO is probably not going to be around for too much longer. For those of you who haven’t had the visceral and disorientating (not to mention incredibly challenging) experience of working your way through one of these bad boys, Four LOKO is like the crystal meth to Sparks’ cocaine. This stuff has a ton of caffeine, taurine, guarana and wormwood, comes in an intimidating 23.5oz can, and has 12% alcohol by volume (which if you do the math, works out to being between 5-6 Miller Lites in one big ole can.) To witness the debilitating effects of Four LOKO, go ahead and show up to the Wednesday night bike polo game in Taney Park, or pretty much any South Philly house show; you will find a number of rather dirty kids reeking of something reminiscent of cough-syrup falling over and screaming things about being four LOKOs deep (alcohol-wise, about a case of Pabst). One of these individuals whom we polled has this illuminating comment to contribute regarding government officials realizing just how bad for you this stuff is:

“Four LOKO is the only thing that makes me truly happy. If the man takes that away from me I will single-handedly burn down the city of Philadelphia…with a blow torch.”

Another piped in with:

“It’s the only way for poor people to get drunk. Not just drunk, but like, wasted.”

Compelling arguments, to be sure. Anyways, the government’s biggest problem with the drink is less about the fact that it’s lightly poisonous and more about the fact that underagers can’t get enough of the stuff, and you know, then they fall over and have concussions and puke a lot. Probably the best thing anyone had to say came from Nafis Nichols of Philadelphia’s Chester Youth Collaborative; he called it “legalized liquid cocaine.”
For those of you that care, rage while you can because the LOKO will be discontinued unless they can find some way to prove that caffeine and alcohol combined is “generally recognized as safe.” Good luck, dudes; everybody else, looks like you’re going to have to go back to drinking 40s.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 1:10 pm.