FDA Reviews Potent Drinks After College Scare

The FDA is investigating the safety of high-caffeine, high-alcohol drinks amid calls to ban them entirely, the AP reports. Responding to an incident in which nine college freshmen were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning after drinking Four Loko, Washington state's attorney general called the drinks a "serious threat to public health and safety." One of the students nearly died.

"It gets you really drunk really fast and it gives you a lot of energy so you're not going to be (lying) down and sleeping," says one student at Central Washington University, which has now banned Four Loko and similar drinks from campus. New Jersey's Ramapo College has done the same. "It's not that we'd seen a lot of consumption, but we'd seen enough that it worried us, because it was in situations of extreme intoxication," said the president. (More Four Loko stories.)