New Products for New Drinkers

Alcohol distributors in recent years have released new products aimed toward young drinkers, such as alcopops and alcoholic energy drinks. “The trend has gone to developing products that are highly youth oriented,” says George Hacker, director of the Alcohol Policies Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “These new products geared toward youth make it easy for young people to initiate drinking.”

Alcopops, such as Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Silver and Skyy Blue, are branded with popular hard-liquor names and often have a higher alcohol content than beer, although the taste of alcohol is masked by sugar, fruit flavorings and carbonation. These products are marketed like beer and advertised on network televisions, despite the network policies against the advertising of their hard-liquor namesakes.

Alcopops are especially popular with young girls. About one third of teenage girls ages 12 to 18 have tried alcopops, according to the California-based Marin Institute. The Marin Institute estimates that underage drinkers consumed 47 percent of all alcopops in California in 2007. Alcopop consumption leads to approximately 60 deaths a year in California and about 50,000 “incidents of harm” — including traffic accidents, violence, suicide, alcohol poisoning and fetal alcohol syndrome, among others — according to the Marin Institute.

Alcoholic energy drinks, such as Tilt, Bud Extra and Sparks, contain high levels of alcohol along with ingredients like caffeine, taurine, ginseng and other stimulants. The mixture of caffeine and alcohol can be dangerous, as it makes drinkers feel more alert, when in fact their senses and reflexes are impaired because of the alcohol. In 2007, Anheuser-Busch pulled its alcoholic energy drink Spyke off shelves after the company received a letter signed by 29 state attorneys general, expressing their concern about the drink.

“Given the documented health and safety risks of consuming alcohol in combination with caffeine or other stimulants, Anheuser-Busch’s decision to introduce and promote these alcoholic energy drinks is extremely troubling,” the letter stated. “Young people are heavy consumers of nonalcoholic energy drinks, and the manufacturers of those products explicitly target the teenage market. Promoting alcoholic beverages through the use of ingredients, packaging features, logos and marketing messages that mimic those of nonalcoholic refreshments overtly capitalizes on the youth marketing that already exists for drinks that may be legally purchased by underage consumers.”

Advocacy groups have been working with state legislatures to pass measures making products such as alcopops and alcoholic energy drinks less accessible to underage youth. One of those measures involves reclassifying alcopops as “distilled spirits,” thus removing them from many grocery and convenience store shelves. Other measures include raising taxes on such items to make them more expensive and therefore less appealing to youth.

Jennifer Wedekind

Reproduced by kind permission of Multinational Monitor. July/August 2008. Vol. 30 No. 1