The thing about that era that nobody seems to remember for some reason is that 4Loko made everyone crazy because there was pseudoephedrine in it. It's an upper that's used as a decongestant, but it also makes people feel like they can do 100 pushups easy when they can barely do 5.
The stuff was in everything. It's WHY "Red Bull gives you wings" and Red Bull has never been the same since it killed some kid who wouldn't stop chugging Red Bulls at a rave, and they had to take it out. The stuff was legal enough to serve in cans at the gas station, you could buy the hell out of pseudoephedrine products of every kind, even if you weren't old enough to drink alcohol in the US, it wasn't really controlled at all, so it was the secret engine behind the Scene Kids, as well.
It was in EVERYTHING. I have a story about being at work with a miserable flu, dragging complete ass and wishing for death, but then lunch came, and I took some TheraFlu that I had, only to spend the rest of the day gacked out of my mind like "let's get these fuckin NUMBERS bro!" Ridiculous.
Dumb old caffeine doesn't hold a candle to it. The real reason pseudo was taken away was because all the tweakers were doing kitchen sink bullshit with stolen cough medicine to make crank and then selling that shit to Indiana truckers, it was crack for people who couldn't get crack. You could already fly off a can of Red Bull, but they had to have more. It was bigger than 4Loko, it was a hell of an era. Motherfuckers were crawling on the roof. Everyone's mom was flipping off of stuff at the drug store that she innocently enough bought for a cold. It explains a lot about the 1995-2005ish era.
There were a lot of different options on the booze racks next to 4Loko, I'm not sure why people latched onto that one brand so hard, probably because it was cheap, or maybe it was the first of its kind. Red Bull doesn't have booze in it. But that's why Red Bull and vodka became a thing, as well, but that drink was a bit too classy to earn the ghetto legend status. For me and my crew, it was Dragon Jooz, which my roommate had to ban from the house. Same shit, though, it was a 4Loko copycat, there were a bunch of them. House parties were nutty for a little while. It was a real obnoxious era for the party people who only smoked weed and had to put up with it.
But the era came to an end. They took the pseudo away from the public. 4Loko and Red Bull both got severe downgrades to "just a bunch of caffeine and maybe booze." A lot of the 4loko copycats vanished forever without their real star ingredient. TheraFlu is probably just aspirin and dust now, or discontinued. Party's over. Thank fuck.
The strange part is how the pseudo wiped everyone's memory somehow. To this day, I still hear people talk about this era like the energy drinks just had a lot of caffeine in them and that's why things were all crazy. No, bro. No. You are missing the most important Horseman in this apocalypse, come on. I think a lot of people weren't all that aware of the ingredients in the can of cheap swill they were pounding, so that's probably why.
