Editor’s note: this opinion was written for the Fall 2023 JEA National Student Media Contests.
It’s Thursday night and you just came home from work after a long day. Immediately, you start pulling out your homework. History, math, science, English, the list continues.
It’s the next day. You wake up, realizing you only got two hours of sleep the previous night, so you go to the nearest Circle-K to buy a Monster in order to get through the day.
Teenagers nowadays are drinking energy drinks more than ever. Recently, several medical groups have restricted the sales of these drinks to specifically teenagers. Catching the attention of school districts, many have slowly begun banning energy drinks on campus. While many teenagers argue that energy drinks are essential to their lives, as a teenager myself, I believe that the federal government should ban the sale of the product at a national level.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1,499 teenagers were sent to the emergency room in 2019 because of energy drink-related issues.
As shown, energy drinks are not good for your health. With the amount of caffeine contained, if taken in an excessive amount, it could potentially lead to death. This being said, being addicted to caffeine is still an addiction and is just as bad for you as if you were addicted to vaping or drugs. If there are laws preventing the sale of other drugs, why isn’t there one for caffeine?
Additionally, energy drinks were never made for teenagers in the first place because of the harm they bring to growing bodies. One major effect of high consumption of energy drinks, due to large amounts of caffeine, is anxiety. You might notice how you start to shake uncontrollably after chugging three Red Bulls or even losing an excessive amount of sleep. These are all side effects of energy drinks. We cannot let these drinks take over our lives. As high schoolers, we are already anxious enough with our busy schedules. Why are we making our days worse by making them 10 times more anxiety-filling?
Now you may ask what you are supposed to do in order to stay awake after a long night. There are alternatives to energy drinks in the market that have fewer side effects than energy drinks. For example, many students I know drink tea as an alternative as it helps them stay awake and focus during the day while having little to no harmful effects on their bodies.
We need to act now and have federal regulations ban the sale of energy drinks to teenagers. They bring many negative side effects such as caffeine addiction and anxiety. The next time you think about opening that can of Prime, we need to realize how these drinks could be what make us lay in a casket tomorrow.
