12
caffeine culture and le fin de millénaire

“Café Society” could be given a broader meaning today than it had in earlier times. It formerly designated the clique of fashionable or bohemian loungers who frequented coffeehouses. It could now be used as a name for our society at large, the “society of the café,” where people meet, mingle, hang out, or rendezvous with a date. The leading situation comedies of the 1990s on network television support this view. In place of 1980s shows like Cheers, which was set in a Boston tavern, were mid-1990s shows such as Friends, Frasier, and Seinfeld, in which the characters regularly assembled over a cup of coffee in either a coffee shop or a café, and the show Ellen, in which a bookstore café was a stock setting for comic routines.

Behind the scenes and on the sets, caffeine is a vital source of energy for the production crew and actors. According to Entertainment Weekly, on Frasier the stars were served the expensive Starbucks Espresso Roast, while the extras and crew were offered assorted flavors from the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. On the set for Ellen, the caffeine supply was more democratic: Foodcraft’s Finest Kona Island Blend was available to all. Some sitcom performers think caffeine may provide too much energy and have decided to avoid it while working. “Michael Richards, who bounced off the walls each week on Seinfeld as Kramer, abstains from coffee drinking. Imagine what he’d be like on espresso,” an article in Entertainment Weekly says.

The idea that caffeine could replace alcohol and that the coffeehouse could replace the tavern is as old as the coffeehouse itself. Coffee earned the epithet “wine of Islam,” and we have seen how in Islamic countries, forbidden alcohol, caffeine was a successful substitute for alcohol and the coffeehouse for the tavern. Although alcohol today is legal in every Western society, there can be little question that, at least in centers of urban sophistication, its regular use is falling into increasing disfavor. There seems to be a general drift away from intoxicants, especially strong ones. An attending phenomenon is the decline of singles bars and dance clubs, in the wake of a new squeamishness about sex. Coffeehouses seem to offer an alternative to the dissolution and dissipation associated with the barroom, while still affording an opportunity for people to meet and converse.

The American coffeehouse is sometimes modeled, with greater or lesser fidelity, on the typical Italian espresso bar. There are purportedly more than two thousand such bars in Italy, and they usually are long, narrow, functional spaces with metal countertops and shelves stacked with liquor bottles. They usually have no stools and few tables and chairs, and the use of the tables they have requires payment of a premium price. The patron steps up to the bar, orders an espresso that comes served in a plain white mug, gulps it down, and leaves. There are no coffeepots in most Italian offices, so these places have a following that their American counterparts can only envy.

One import from these Italian shops is the barista, a man who makes a career of running the espresso machines. Increasing numbers of tiny American establishments are opening in nooks all over the country, sometimes called “espresso windows.” One in Washington, D.C., occupies the ninety-six-square-foot space vacated when an elevator was relocated. However, American “designer” espresso bars are more upscale and tend to rely for their atmosphere on such appurtenances as cherry wood paneling and ceramic tile floors. As one Starbucks proprietor said of his company’s cafés, “We want our stores to be an extension of your home.”


Who’s Doing It: Caffeine Consumption Patterns

There have been few field studies of caffeine consumption patterns, that is, who uses it, how they use it, and how often they use it, especially outside of the United States. However, it is obvious that there is considerable variation in this consumption among individuals and populations.1

Some overall observations can be reliably made:

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This cartoon satirizes two aspects of the American coffeehouse craze, spearheaded by the Starbucks outlets nationwide: These coffeehouses seek to provide a comfortable home away from home, and they are turning up everywhere, even where we might least have expected them. (David Sipress, 1995)

Average Annual Alcohol Consumption in America

Year                                      per adult in gallons of ethanol
1700 5.7 (in England)
1790 5.8
1830 7.1
1840 3.1
1860 2.1
1890 2.1
1900 2.1
1920 0.9
1940 1.56
1980 2.76

Adapted from David Musto, “Alcohol and American History,” Scientific American, April 1996.

Today in the United States more than 80 percent of adults consume caffeine on a daily basis. The average daily consumption among all adults is approximately 200 mg per day and among caffeine consumers is approximately 280 mg. Applying the standards and definitions discussed in our section on caffeine dependence, this would mean 75 million people fit the criteria for moderate caffeine dependence.

The average daily consumption of coffee in many other countries is considerably higher than in the United States. The highest coffee consuming-countries, in descending order, are: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France. All have higher levels than the United States, with Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway boasting consumption levels from two to three times as great.4

The United States’ consumption of coffee declined by nearly 40 percent between 1962, the year in which the highest levels were reached, and 1982, with most of the decline occurring in the first ten years of this period. Because the average number of cups per coffee drinker declined only 20 percent, we know that many people quit drinking coffee entirely. The decline of caffeine intake from coffee was even greater, for in the same period the consumption of decaffeinated coffee as a percentage of total coffee consumption increased from 3 percent to 20 percent. During these twenty years, however, consumption of soft drinks more than doubled, and because all five topselling soft drinks contain caffeine, there seems to have been not so much a decline in total caffeine intake as a partial switch from coffee to soda as the vehicle of ingestion.


Baby Boomers and Caffeine

In 1996, a magazine called New Choices conducted a national survey of the first baby boomers, born in 1946, and just turning fifty. They found that about two-thirds are happy with their sex lives, and the same percentage are unhappy about their career choices. When speaking of drugs, of those expressing a preference, the largest number, 27 percent, cited exercise [sic], and the next largest, 25 percent, cited caffeine as their drug of choice.5

Why should caffeine have topped the long list of recreational drugs once popular with this group? For those of the “flower power” generation, now at the height of maturity, whose tastes were jaded by enveloping euphorics and timber-rattling stimulants, common caffeine has reemerged as the drug of choice. No doubt it was forgotten in the wild drug party that started in Haight-Ashbury in the mid- 1960s and eventually made its way around the world and back. To those who binged on methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, LSD, Quaaludes, or any of a long list of agents used for excitement in the wake of Timothy Leary and acid rock, caffeine did not even rise to the level of notice as a psychoactive substance. After all, it was not only legal and a fixture of the straight, business-driven world, but even the most timid grandmother would take it in her tea.

Thirty years later, the terrible hangover brought on by all that overindulgence has finally lifted. Now people are looking for a different high, one that is enjoyable but safe, one that not only does not destroy a productive life but can actually improve it. That’s why all eyes have turned back to caffeine. As a drug, caffeine works: It wakes you up, improves your cognitive powers, increases your energy output—and yet it is, for all anybody can tell to date, remarkably safe for healthy adults to use in normal quantities.


Generations X, Y, and Z and Caffeine

Some of us still harbor a mental image of the coffeehouse as a den of idle adults, indulging in a relatively innocent form of recreation. Many also imagine that the taste for coffee is itself an acquired one that rarely sets in before age twenty-one. But in fact an increasing number of the nation’s thirty-five hundred coffeehouses are becoming kiddy capitals, attracting unprecedented numbers of children in their early teens, who are, from all reports, consuming coffee in copious caffeine-charged gulps that would give many grown-ups the jitters.

Why the coffeehouse? It is a place that thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds can come to hang out, sometimes into the early-morning hours, talk, watch people, and do so in an “adult” environment that has, at least to their innocent sensibilities, an aura of sophistication. Unlike bars, coffeehouses are open to children because many do not serve alcohol. They offer an alternative to the video arcade, the local mall, or the street corner as a congenial spot to assemble. And where else can a kid go to get a legal high? Children generally are not permitted to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or enjoy many of the other minor vices that make adult life tolerable. Is it any wonder that they flock to the centers of refreshment that make caffeine abundantly available in a variety of attractive and delicious presentations? Some people are questioning the possible deleterious effects of all that caffeine on their systems. No one really knows if caffeine use in children has any harmful effects, although so far none have been demonstrated. Meanwhile, we can assert with confidence that drinking coffee is better for a teenager than drinking alcohol or sniffing cocaine.

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Too Much coffee Man & Klix, the Happy Computer, cartoon strip by Shannon Wheeler, from a series dedicated to lampooning the effects produced by excessive coffee use. In this cartoon, the user gains confidence in using a computer after drinking one cup of coffee, but ends up suffering from the effects of working for four days straight, presumably as a result of the excessive use of caffeine. (By permission of the artist)

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“Caffeine—After 3,500 Years: Still the Most Popular Drug,” cartoon by Robert Therrien, Jr., a.k.a., BADBOB. In this fanciful version of caffeine history, hieroglyphs depict Egyptians attending an oversized espresso machine, even though, of course, there is no evidence that either the Egyptians or any other people knew of coffee or caffeine as early as 3,500 years ago. (By permission of the artist)

Brewings and Doings: Caffeine Mainstays and Curiosities

At the end of 1994 Celestial Seasonings, famous as the United States’ largest manufacturer of herbal teas, which have no caffeine, began marketing six flavors of caffeine-rich black teas, the market category which accounts for 90 percent of retail tea sales. The real innovation, demonstrating an increase in awareness of caffeine among consumers, was the simultaneous addition of “caffeine meters,” displayed on the side of each box of black tea, showing shoppers the caffeine content of the tea in milligrams as compared with the caffeine in coffee, cola, and chocolate.

For the first time, we hear people saying, “I need some caffeine to wake up,” instead of “I need some coffee.” Courses in preparing coffee, tea, and chocolate, and about their history as comestibles have been offered for years. Today, courses at adult extension schools are being offered in “Caffeine Culture.” There is little question that caffeine has finally caught the full attention of many of the people who have been using it so relentlessly. It is interesting to explore some of the signs of this new awareness of caffeine.


Spike Coffee—The Coffee for Caffeine Addicts

Some people may drink coffee for its taste, others for both taste and the caffeine lift, but the targeted consumers for Spike, a brand that touts itself as containing “50 percent more caffeine,” are interested in the drug content only. The ads, which feature a graphic display of Spike’s relatively greater caffeine content than other sources and a logo of a cup of coffee being injected by a syringe presumably filled with caffeine, fail to mention that the beans containing the most caffeine are of the robusta variety, inferior by every measure of taste to the justifiably more coveted and more expensive arabica beans.


Caffeine and, Well, Water

Perhaps one the most dramatic tributes to the rising interest in caffeine is the introduction of the drink Water Joe by Johnny Beverage Inc. in 1996. Touted as “the leading caffeine-enhanced water,” Water Joe is a no-frills product for people who don’t want any chlorine, calories, sugar, or artificial flavorings, but do want pure artesian well water laced with a generous dose of caffeine. Among Water Joe’s promotional suggestions: Make your morning coffee with Water Joe for an extra boost. One large group of potential Water Joe drinkers comprises athletes or dieters who want the boost of caffeine but know they must be careful to compensate for the dehydration that it can induce. But perhaps Water Joe’s biggest market is among those who don’t like coffee but still crave the lift it provides. David Marcheschi, president of Chicago-based Johnny Beverage, was among their number. Explaining that he thought up the idea for caffeinated water while in college, he recalls, “I didn’t like coffee or colas, but I still needed to study.”

How much caffeine does a bottle of Water Joe contain? The advertising says as much as one cup of coffee. This specification doesn’t really tell us very much, and the product label doesn’t add any information. The dose claimed by some of the press coverage is 70 mg of caffeine added to a half-liter, 16.9-ounce, bottle. There is no question that Water Joe lives up to its claims not to contain any calories, sugars, or preservatives and not to stain teeth, but does it “taste just like water,” as the company’s promotional literature suggests? Johnny Beverage claims that it relies on a method developed by a flavor chemist to mask caffeine’s usually bitter taste. However, company officials refused to discuss this claim with us in any way. Our informal taste test found people about evenly divided among those who tasted only pure spring water and those who detected a faint flavor, which we attribute to the presence of caffeine.


Mixing Your Drinks: Caffeine and Alcohol

In 1995 Starbucks Coffee Company, with more than 650 retail operations, joined forces with Redhook Ale Brewery to create Double Black Stout, dark roasted malt beer targeted at specialty coffee and beer drinkers alike. Redhook president and CEO Paul Shipman says that the idea for the new brew came up in an impromptu conversation over a cup of coffee. The final product is the result of diligent testing and blend-ing of test brews. According to the companies’ public relations people, the brewers and coffee specialists experienced an amazing synergy, because “the similarities of brewing fine beer and roasting fine coffee were an inspiration to the whole group and resulted in a brew that showcases the best of both products.” After primary fermentation of the stout, Redhook adds brewed Starbucks coffee to the beer. The resulting mix is supposed to combine the full, roasted flavor of stout with the aroma and flavor of arabica coffee. Starbucks coffee specialists have chosen a blend of Central American coffees for the beer, which is said to deliver “remarkable rich, roasted coffee notes to Double Black Stout.”


Carbonated Coffee

North American Coffee Partnership, the joint venture formed in August 1995 by Pepsi-Cola and Starbucks, test marketed a new product: Mazagran, a lightly carbonated beverage made with Starbucks coffee. Touted as a new version of a 150year-old beverage supposedly once popular with the French Foreign Legion, it will be sold at Starbucks fountains and in bottles in grocery stores.

Another similar product, also by PepsiCo, hit U.S. grocers’ shelves in mid-1996: Pepsi-Kona, a coffee-flavored carbonated cola drink, so soda and coffee lovers can finally have it both ways. A new mixed drink called a “Turbo Coke” seems in line with this product: a tall glass of Coke with ice and a shot of espresso.


The Coffee Shop Connection—Keeping Them off the Streets

Holland is one of the few European countries that never experienced a movement to ban coffee or tea. Carrying on this tradition of tolerance, today in the Netherlands, where the use and possession of small amounts of marijuana is not customarily subjected to legal sanctions, young and old flock to establishments euphemistically known as “coffee shops” to buy and smoke marijuana while they sit around sipping their favorite caffeinated drink. There are examples of small communities where the civic leaders have applied for and received funding from the national government to support the establishment of such coffee shops intended to provide teenagers with a salubrious place to hang out and get high.


Caffeine Currents: From Coffee to Tea?

In 1996, reports began circulating in the press about a new enthusiasm for specialty teas, following the success of the specialty coffee trend, although, in one reporter’s words, it “hasn’t taken off with the fervor of a caffeine buzz.” In Seattle and Portland, two of the cities to initiate the coffeehouse revival in the United States, the use of tea is on the rise. Even the British tea garden and Japanese teahouse are undergoing new incarnations, as teahouses open for business in markets heavily saturated with more traditionally American cafés.

What is the motivation for the switch from coffee to tea? Partly it’s the social connotations. The partisans of tea associate it with leisurely conversation and relaxation as opposed to their more frenetic associations with coffee. Partly it’s a matter of the taste. Some people like caffeine but just don’t like the taste of coffee. Steve Smith, founder of Tazo Teas, produces bottles of what he calls “microbrewed” teas. He also runs several tea bars in specialty supermarkets and at universities such as Harvard and Portland State.

Is the tea trend here to stay? We can’t say for sure, but one sign of the times is the fact that even Starbucks now sells a half-dozen varieties of tea.


Kopi Luak Coffee: Waste Not, Want Not

If you think that Jamaica Blue Mountain is the scarcest and costliest coffee, you are unfamiliar with Kopi Luak.

Coffee’s propagation in Africa, India, and Indonesia and the harvesting of the world’s rarest and most expensive beans are intimately linked with the dietary and excretory habits of a certain curious animal called the civet cat. In Krapf ‘s nineteenthcentury account of his missionary work in Africa, he states, without elaboration, that the civet cat may have been responsible for introducing the coffee plant into the Ethiopian highlands from central Africa:

According to the Arabian tradition, the civet-cat brought the coffee-bean to the mountains of the Arusi and the Itta-Gallas, where it grew and was long cultivated, till an enterprising merchant carried the coffee-plant five hundred years ago, to Arabia, where it soon became acclimatized.6

Supposedly, the beans emerge still covered with their original mucilage or silver skin. In 1740 Spanish Jesuits brought coffee seedlings from Java to the Philippines, where the plant proliferated dramatically, largely as a result of the dietary preferences of the native civet cat, which, like the African civet cat spoken of by Krapf, enjoyed the fruit and spread the indigestible seeds in its droppings.7

The animal in question is one of the three species of palm civets in the genus Paradoxurus, the family Viverridae. Its relatives include mongooses, civets, and genets. Two of the three species are confined to India and Sri Lanka, while the third, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, is found throughout Southeast Asia, the East Indies, the Philippines, and Africa. Other names for the animal include “musang,” and “toddy cat.”

Despite some of its many aliases, however, Paradoxurus is not a true cat. These cute animals, with catlike faces, have long gray-brown fur with dorsal stripes and lateral spots and a long tail. They live five or more years, are about one and a half to two and a half feet long, and weigh six or seven pounds. Although they feed on small animals they also eat bulbs, nuts, and fruits, which is how they enter the history of coffee.

Other animals play a part in spreading coffee as well. In 1922, William Ukers reported that in some regions of India, birds and monkeys enjoy eating the ripe coffee berries because of their tasty pulp. The beans, however, pass undigested through their alimentary canals. Gathered by the natives, these beans are recycled to make so-called monkey coffee.8 In Coffee Botany, Cultivation, and Utilization (1961), Frederick L. Wellman offers an account of varied relationships between animals and the proliferation of the coffee plant, giving birds the credit of spreading coffee within Africa, from Ethiopia into the Sudan, and the civet cat for doing so in Hawaii.9

In 1994, after a thirteen-year search, Mark Montanous, while in Europe, finally found a Dutch coffee broker who had what he claimed were the raw, green Indonesian kopi luak beans. Montanous bought 70 pounds for $7,000 and now is retailing it virtually at cost at $105 a pound, making it easily the most expensive coffee in the world.

Is it worth it? We are told that this coffee is not to everyone’s taste. Even though some people claim it has a delightful heavy, musty, caramel taste and aroma, others find it strong and repellent. So far, Montanous has sold about 45 pounds, with a few repeat (apparently satisfied) customers.


When Caffeine-Free Is Definitely Better for Your Health

The first detailed intensive study of water quality of the Mississippi River was released in 1996 by the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior. Thousands of samples were collected for this study from 1987 through 1992, during ten separate sampling trips that were timed to show the effects of high water, low water, rising water levels, and falling water levels. Several years of subsequent laboratory analysis produced the results. Geological Survey chief hydrologist Bob Hirsch commented on the significance of the study: “The contaminants we measure in the Mississippi represent a report card on our clean-up efforts on the streams and rivers that drain nearly half the country.”

Not surprisingly, the scientists checked for levels of such contaminants as lead and detergents. They also checked for, and discovered, caffeine. Because in this region caffeine is found only in coffee, tea, chocolate, and soft drinks consumed only by humans, when it is found in domestic sewage it can be used to track the extent to which that sewage is diluted by the Mississippi River. Concentrations of caffeine in the river indicate that domestic sewage may be diluted as much as a thousandfold. Whether this is an acceptable level is a question best left to ecological experts, but it seems clear that caffeine-free river, lake, or spring water is definitely the least hazardous to your health.10


When Is Caffeine Not Caffeine?

Misinformation about caffeine abounds today, even as it did in the days of Simon Pauli and Buntekuh. Herbal remedy sales representatives take advantage of a generalized concern about caffeine to help push “alternative” products, for which they promise the same or greater benefits. Unfortunately for the unwary, the active ingredient in many of these nostrums is either caffeine or caffeine compounded, potentially dangerously, with ephedrine, which is sometime referred to as “ma-huang,” the Chinese herb from which it is derived. The following ad on the Internet for EXTRA BOOST was particularly amusing because it touts a guarana-based supplement as a medicine to reduce “cravings for caffeine,” a claim which is certainly true, because one of its active ingredients is caffeine.

For anyone imagining that EXTRA BOOST is a magical new remedy, the letdown comes quickly, as soon as the two active ingredients are described:

Guarana:

This is a plant that grows in the northern and western portions of Brazil. Reportedly, its seeds have been used for centuries by the natives of the Amazon for added energy and mental alertness.

Mahuang:

Imported from China, this plant, according to the Chinese, reduces the desire for food, metabolizes fat, increases energy and mental alertness.

Another ad, this time for guarana capsules, is more accurate, declaring, “Guarana is a caffeine-rich extract that, in addition to 2–3 times the caffeine found in coffee, also contains xanthine compounds such as theobromine and theophylline. Made into a popular Brazilian cola drink, guarana is consumed for energy and stimulation. Guarana has also been used traditionally as an anti-diuretic, a nerve tonic, to reduce hunger, and to relieve headaches, migraines and PMS symptoms.”


From Cyberspace to Outerspace to a Pretty Face: Caffeine on the Internet and Beyond

A cybercafé is a coffeehouse in cyberspace. That is, it is a coffeehouse without a house and without coffee. So in what sense is it a coffeehouse at all? In the sense that the coffeehouse serves as a universal symbol for a forum in which friendly strangers, often gathered from the fringes of society, can convene to discuss art, politics, science, or almost any other subject matter. That is what the coffeehouse was in the lands of its inception, the cities, villages, and travelers’ inns of the Middle East in the sixteenth century. That is what it was in England in the seventeenth century, in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, in Seattle in the 1980s, and that is what it is in cyberspace as we enter the third millennium. At the traditional coffeehouse people sit at little tables, sip coffee, read the news, and meet and talk face to face. At the cybercafé, there are little monitors and keyboards, at which people sit, sip coffee, search the web and chat with people around the world. Thus the cybercafé carries forward the tradition of coffee-house conversation into the twenty-first century.

The notion of the “extended café” that the cybercafé embodies is not as unprecedented as it may appear at first. Since at least the nineteenth century, the word “café,” which simply means “coffee” in French, has been used worldwide to designate establishments that serve alcohol or absinthe and light food, occasionally featuring musical performers, and only incidentally serving coffee. It also designates a small, plain or fancy, informal restaurant. For whatever reasons, the word “coffee” has come to signify public places for gathering to drink, talk, eat, or be entertained. Rather than diminishing our estimate of caffeine’s importance, this linguistic generalization suggests that caffeine’s social significance is both deep and broad.

What do a design studio in Atlanta, a poetry magazine in San Francisco, a software module for Apple computers, and a new multiplayer Internet game have in common? They all go by the name “caffeine.” Suddenly caffeine, not just its vehicles coffee and tea, is on everyone’s tongue. A network magazine supporting proprietary online services recently issued a list of the Best of the Web. One category, including about a dozen sites, most of which feature high-tech products, was “Coffee and Caffeine.” A Canadian food information bureau uses the acronym CAFFEINE for its home page. Another example of its acronymic use is Computer Aided Fast Fabrication Exploration in Engineering, an Internet site hailing from Berkeley.

Perhaps it is because of the profile of caffeine’s cognitive effects, its power to increase alertness, speed, diligence, and retention, especially in repetitive tasks, that computer people are among the leading caffeine consumers in America. Or perhaps it’s just that they get weary from long hours writing and using software. Whatever the reason, the link between computer work and caffeine is pretty much taken for granted as a fact of popular culture. For example, in a 1996 news article, “What computer users really want in a keyboard,” Joe Fasbinder, a UPI reporter, describes a computer keyboard with a special feature aimed at caffeine users: “if you spill any ‘computer-programmer’ fluids (i.e., anything with caffeine in it), you can simply keep typing, or take the thing to the kitchen sink, run some water over it and let it dry out.”

In the roiling seas of the Internet it’s difficult for one person to make a big splash. One man who is trying is Shannon Wheeler. He has dedicated himself to creating and disseminating comic books, T-shirts, and other pop culture paraphernalia celebrating the culture of caffeine and the adventures of a character with a large coffee cup permanently affixed to the top of his head, called simply the “Too Much Coffee Man.” Another Internet caffeine promoter, Robert Therrien, or BADBOB, as he calls himself, is a former student at Antioch, a caffeine aficionado, Internet maven, cartoonist, and something of a versifier. In his cartoons he cries out with existential angst over the cognitive, emotional, and social dissonances that ripple outward from the caffeine habitué.11

An effort to use caffeine to promote products is found in a 1995 Working Woman article on new skin creams.12 The article features information on Clinique’s Moisture On-Call, ($30/1.7 oz), a product that, according to Shirley Weinstein, Clinique’s vice president of product development, “uses caffeine to catalyze the production of lipids, substances that keep the skin moist and unlined, at the basal-cell layer. Results begin to show in about a month, the amount of time it takes cells to move from the bottom of the epidermis to its surface.” Weinstein referred our inquiries to the company’s public relations department, which left us a message to the effect that Clinique did not “participate in books.” And so we have no information about how caffeine gets the lipid-producing juices flowing.

A news story from China illustrates how caffeine there is placed in the same category as the West places dangerous narcotics. It was reported by the Heilongjiang Daily, dateline Beijing, March 29, 1995, that police in northern China arrested a ring of seventeen caffeine dealers who were attempting to close a deal to sell a large quantity of caffeine pills. Like opium and other psychoactive drugs, caffeine is a controlled substance in China. Police seized 85 pounds of caffeine and more than one million caffeine pills, with a reputed street value of several hundred thousand dollars. The ring had illegally diverted the caffeine from a pharmaceutical shipment en route from Beijing.13

In the 1960s, the days of acid rock, songs such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Spoonful” celebrated drugs such as LSD and cocaine. In the more timid culture of the 1990s, caffeine has become a drug noticed and venerated by the young. There have been several recent songs about the mind- and body-altering power of caffeine in coffee. We have also noticed an increase in the word “caffeine” figuring into phrases, such as “he needs a shot of caffeine,” that formerly referenced other drugs such as adrenaline.

An Internet thread in the alt.drugs.caffeine newsgroup began with a message to the effect that a handful of chocolate-covered coffee beans, which are “SO easy to just sit and munch,” release as much caffeine when eaten as you get from drinking a cup of coffee, so it is wise to be careful and not eat the whole bag. In response a member of a rock band called Cathead reminisced about some uses of whole beans backstage before concerts:

Before every show (back in the good old days) we would share a bag (i.e. You know the bags they offer in the bulk section of Safeway?) of espresso beans. I can only say that each show back then was really intense…every time.14

Is the coffee and tea party really nearly over? Some people, evidently disgusted with the caffeine craze sweeping the world at the turn of the millennium, have lined up to prophesy the end of the excitement. Several books have appeared in the last few years cautioning people about the supposed dangers of caffeine consumption. One of their number is Caffeine Blues: Wake up to the Hidden Dangers of America’s #1 Drug, by Stephen A.Cherniske (Warner Books, 1998). The publisher states that this book, which presents a daunting panoply of dire warnings about caffeine reminiscent of Simon Pauli, “exposes the harmful side effects of caffeine and gives readers a step-by-step program to reduce intake, boost energy, create a new vibrant life and recognize the dangers.” Another is Danger: Caffeine, by Patra M.Sevastiade (Rosen Publishing Group, 1998), a book intended for children five to nine that “explains how caffeine affects the body and the harm overuse of it can cause.” Still another is Addiction-Free—Naturally: Liberating Yourself from Tobacco, Caffeine, Sugar, Alcohol, Prescription Drugs, Cocaine, and Narcotics, by Brigette Mars (Inner Traditions International, 2000), which, as the title makes obvious, puts caffeine in some pretty nasty company. A more unusual contribution to cautionary caffeine literature is Brief Epidemiology of Crime: With Particular Reference to the Relationship between Caffeine and Alcohol Use and Crime, by Peter D.Hay (Peter D.Hay, 1999).

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Cartoons by Robert Thierrien, Jr., a.k.a. BADBOB. These energetic images, among a series by the artist celebrating caffeine’s place in contemporary culture, have been widely reproduced on T-shirts and coffee mugs. (By permission of the artist)

Organizations have arisen to help people avoid what their members regard as the evils of caffeine. Among them are Caffeine Anonymous, a twelve-step program of caffeine addicts who gather weekly at a church to support each other’s efforts to quit. More radical are the efforts of Caffeine Prevention Plus, a nonprofit organization “dedicated to caffeine and coffee prevention.” A consultant for this redoubtable group recently wrote an article advocating that coffee be made an illegal substance because of the harm it poses for coffee drinkers and society. In his scientismic polemic to outlaw caffeine, he explains that the putative therapeutic benefits of caffeine are figments of the “coffee lobby” and that there are other compounds available to do anything caffeine can do and do it better. In addition, according to this group, caffeine is solely responsible for more than 25 percent of British bad business decisions, including the Barings bank disaster, and is believed to be involved in aggravating more than 50 percent of all marital disputes in the United States.