5 of the Most Overrated Legal Highs -- An Attack on Everyday Drugs (and a Few You've Never Heard of)

By Manfred Johnson, AlterNet. Posted February 17, 2009.

My local coffee shop has started selling little bags of concentrated coffee solution in mini ketchup-style packages that taste like those chemical puddles you see in junkyards.

And now the otherwise praiseworthy subculture of long-distance road bicyclists supports multiple product lines of caffeine concentrates -- they swallow them in gel form, syrups, chews and bars.

It’s all pretty pointless, when the maximum utility of caffeine is that it can mildly stimulate you for about 45 minutes. Attempts to go beyond that  are like the disappointment of seeing a movie set in real life, which is pretty much how I feel about the explosion of carbonated energy drinks. 

Rockstar and the Rest of the Energy Drink Industry

They come in many fake fruity flavors and spiffy decorated aluminum cans that look like Pete Wentz's favorite T-shirt. They have grown in popularity beyond the younger X Games, trash-rock crowd that was the original target market.

The heaving, boozing post-frat/sorority-house young professionals are guzzling these now, too. It's part of the buzz-booze fusion in the culture: They drink it to potentiate the alcohol and stay awake hours longer while all those shots of Jack swirl around inside the belly. Proven to reduce drunken staggering by 30 percent.

It contains roughly 160 milligrams of that rather ubiquitous drug, caffeine, in every 16-ounce can (average normal coffee contains 75 milligrams). To be clear, these drinks are pretty much caffeinated sugar water, with some additional marketed chemicals, like Red Bull’s much touted taurine. There’s no scientific proof whatsoever that taurine stimulates or gives energy at all. So really, it’s just coffee under another name and flavor.

Rockstar, along with the rest of the glorified energy drink market, which is littered with names that sound like Sarah Palin's children -- Amp, Full Throttle, SoBe, No Fear, Red Bull and BooKoo -- is a hateful enterprise.

But what separates Rockstar from the pack is that the product was launched by the offspring of someone even more detestable than Sarah Palin: shock-jock radio host Michael Savage (whose real last name is Weiner).

Savage's son, Russell Goldencloud Weiner, founded Rockstar, which has now gone global. Savage's wife, Janet Weiner, is the chief financial officer of the company.

When Savage isn't out there mocking homosexuals, or making racist jabs at Arabs and the Obama family, he's out there pushing his son's drink -- maybe it's just fatherly pride. Savage couldn't even take his Rockstar cap off to pose for a photo with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., at an election rally from last year:

Kava

Departing rather starkly from the world of mainstream highs to obscure ones, kava is one of the more popular ethno-botanical legal "highs."

High is a very relative word, because I suppose you couldn't deny experiencing some sensatory high if you ate enough cardboard. It's just the art of poisoning yourself that we're talking about here.

The cardboard high would probably be obscured by digestive poisoning, a bloody nose and tremors from the bleaching agents, but deep down you'd be able to detect some kind of high.

Anyway, kava. Herbal pharmacies sell low doses of kava as a product to relieve stress and anxiety, a mild tranquilizer in gel caps or extracts. 

When I first read about kava on the drug resource Erowid, I popped down to my local health food store, bought a bottle of gel caps and popped 10 of them in the store. I get a little relaxed after drinking a glass of grapefruit juice, and this was roughly the same experience.

But still -- there's so much damn hype about kava, and rather impressive tribal worship of the drug in the South Pacific, that I thought I'd give it a second chance. So I ordered a bag of it from an online supplier. 

In places like Polynesia and Vanuatu, the roots of the kava plant are crushed into a fine powder and then stuffed into the anus with a device resembling a musket loader. Just kidding. They make a frothy cold beverage out of it.

The bag of kava I ordered came with a small sack of lecithin to help blend the active ingredient with water, which the instructions told me to dump in a blender with the root powder. It got really frothy. I strained the pulpy juice and poured 20 ounces of it into a glass.

The taste of the kava froth drink is unbearably bad -- gag inducing; soapy. Better said, like very soapy dishwater, because there was something else in that taste, but it's hard to put a finger on exactly what it was -- kind of like when you drink dishwater. It's recommended to mix the kava solution with fruit juice, but I don't see how any flavor could override the soap taste -- maybe tweak it at best; turn it into flavored soap.

See more stories tagged with: drugs, alcohol, caffeine, energy drinks, kava, sinicuichi, rockstar energy drink, heimia salicifolia

Manfred Johnson likes to have a rollicking good time.

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