BUZZED ON COFFEE AND DOUBLE STANDARDS:

Anyway, let’s talk about caffeine, or to be more accurate let’s use caffeine as a way to set up my segue. Esquire has a buzzy article about the dangers of getting too buzzed on coffee. It’s a weird piece on the merits because it focuses on people, literal addicts, who drink a lot of coffee. It opens with a story about a guy who drank the equivalent of 10 cups a day. There’s a scary chart that explains that four cups is the recommended limit for “non-pregnant adults.” Ten cups: “negative symptoms can arise.” And 10-14 cups? We’re told that’s a “fatal dose” next to a picture of a human skull!

The author, John McDermott, writes:

So ubiquitous is caffeine in our culture that it doesn’t even register to people as a drug. Step out of the office for a midafternoon cigarette and people might look at you askance. Get caught doing a bump of coke in the office bathroom as a midday pick-me-up and it’s grounds for immediate termination. But slam a Monster or a quad-shot Americano at work and people will think you’re a go-getter.

To which I say, “Um, duh.”

Now, I’ll skip through most of my other complaints about the article and instead provide just a little perspective. First of all, according to McDermott, 80 percent of Americans consume caffeine. That’s about 265 million people. Meanwhile, a 2018 study found that 92 people died from caffeine overdoses in a given year. Let’s round that up to 100. That means about 0.000037736 percent of Americans die every year from overdoses of this horrible drug hiding in plain sight. Meanwhile, in 2016, 951 people died from contact with a power lawn mower. More than 1,100 people died from falls related to ice skates, skateboards, etc. More than 2,100 died from … constipation. More than 10,000 accidentally died from suffocation or strangulation in bed (and we’re not talking about the David Carradine-style deaths). But be careful fleeing your potentially literal deathbed! Because more than 10,000 people die every year falling out of bed.

And yes, yes, I understand that caffeine abuse surely plays a much more lethal role as a contributing factor to other problems. I mean spaghetti carbonara isn’t lethal, but overdoing it can make other problems worse. But you get the point.

I’m so old, I can remember when Esquire ran articles by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Michael Herr. I’d like to think the editors of that era of the magazine would be rolling their eyes at the thought of running an article on the dangers of…caffeine.