

How America’s love affair with caffeine has sparked a crisis of overdoses - nether
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/09/02/how-americas-love-affair-with-caffeine-has-sparked-a-crisis-of-overdoses-and-what-the-fda-is-trying-to-do-about-it/

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NoGravitas
>The new products have led to an alarming public health development in recent
years that was unheard of in the many previous decades that people enjoyed
caffeine: a rash of thousands of overdoses and reports of addiction and
withdrawal.

Overdoses being mostly new, I believe, considering how many cups of coffee
you'd have to drink to get a lethal dose. But surely addiction and withdrawal
are nothing new. If I let my intake creep up over three cups of coffee per day
for over two weeks, I get a severe headache if I go a day without at least one
cup. Caffeine withdrawal headaches at least used to be so common that popular
headache remedies would include caffeine as well as aspirin and acetaminophen.
Is this somehow not common knowledge?

~~~
dalke
I noticed that it didn't give any trend numbers, only statements that things
have gotten worse.

As a teen in the 1980s, I remember Jolt Cola ("All the sugar and twice the
caffeine") and a schoolmate who took powdered caffeine.

Ha! It was remarkably easy to find this newspaper article from 1988 - "Youth
abusing easy-to-get caffeine pills";
[https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1454&dat=19880612&id=...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1454&dat=19880612&id=eUlOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KBQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6900,5118794&hl=en)
.

> King said abuse of caffeine pills is fairly common among the teens and young
> adults treated by her [drug treatment] program. ... Sixteen people in North
> Carolina have died of caffeine poisoning since 1970, all from pills.

That's about 1/year. The N.C. population in 1990 was 2.67% of the US
population, giving about 35 overdose deaths/year in the 1980s. (With of course
large error bars.)

This story from 2006
[https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1893&dat=20061102&id=...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1893&dat=20061102&id=jgspAAAAIBAJ&sjid=9dUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3381,188366&hl=en)
focuses more on energy drinks:

> In October, a new study found a surprising number of caffeine overdose
> reports to a Chicago poison control center. These involved young people
> taking alertness pill such as NoDoz or energy drinks ... During three years
> of reports to the center, the researchers found 265 cases of caffeine abuse.
> Twelve percent of those required a trip to the hospital.

Compare that to this article, which says "this year from Jan. 1 to July 31,
poison centers across the country logged 1,675 reports involving energy
drinks." Chicago has 1/120th of the US population, so 265/3*120/2 = 5,000
expected cases based on the Chicago numbers.

Obviously "caffeine overdose reports" is a superset of "reports involving
energy drinks", but it's also obvious that the article doesn't give enough
information to tell if it's something to be concerned about. Perhaps it's a
sideways brag about how wired everyone is these days?

