Murrieta Firm Halts Sale of ‘Cocaine’ Energy Drink
By Kimberly Pierceall, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.
May 7–The Murrieta-based makers of an energy drink dubbed Cocaine have pulled the beverage from store shelves and stopped selling it before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could force them to take that action, a company official said.
The FDA issued a warning letter last month that said Redux Beverages LLC was illegally marketing the drink as a street-drug alternative and a dietary supplement, but the agency had yet to demand the company stop marketing or selling the product.
Rather than wait for the FDA to take action, the company removed its product from the market, said Clegg Ivey, a partner in the company. The company also barred online customers from buying the drinks and, on the Web site, the words “banned by the man” appeared adjacent to each picture of the drink.
“They don’t have to actually hit you with a sledgehammer for you to feel it ; they just have to brandish it and look at you menacingly,” Ivey said.
The FDA cited as evidence the drink’s labeling and Web site, which included the statements “Speed in a Can,”"Liquid Cocaine” and “Cocaine — Instant Rush.” At one point the company claimed an ingredient reduced cholesterol and helped prevent hardened arteries, but Ivey said it was the result of an over excited marketing person who found information saying as much on Wikipedia and included it on the firm’s Web site .
The company says Cocaine contains no drugs and is marketed as an energy drink. It has been sold since last August in at least a dozen states, but not in Inland Southern California.
The company will announce a new name within a week and hopes to revive the Cocaine brand after reasoning with state and federal authorities, Ivey said. Attorneys general in Connecticut and Illinois recently announced that Redux had agreed to stop marketing Cocaine in those states, and a judge in Texas has halted distribution there.
Fans responded to the announcement that Redux would stop marketing Cocaine by leaving dozens of messages, many of them profanity-laced, on a page created for the product on the social networking site MySpace .com.
The energy drink is the first product marketed by Redux, which wants to keep the name Cocaine because it fits with the company’s tongue-in-cheek approach, Ivey said.
“It would be fun and kind of cheeky and it might be the kind of thing that 20- to 30-year-olds would get,” he said. “We think that our customers get the joke.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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