Poor students + cheep caffeine = 20 year old heart attacks
Some of these stories have brought back memories of a very strange period of my life.

A few years back me and my friend repeatedly found ourselves coming to the weekend with the highly unusual desire to punish our bodies and chemically induce our minds to leave the harsh reality of living in our run-down little town. (Imagine that!)

As many stories involving ill-advised experiments go it was conceived though an unlikely combo of the above desire, and a lack of cash with which to achieve it.

We would have to improvise!! We sat down and a plan was devised,

We concluded the cheapest way to get off our trolley was to stay at home, where it was warm and had TV, internet and terrible, terrible films. We also assumed that budget supermarkets and bulk goods would be the best way forward.

OFF TO LIDL!!!!

Yes, that fantastic shining hub of organized commerce that is Lidl, we stumbled in and began to look around for their biggest, finest, cheapest alcohol. (Or something that resembled alcohol) This part was easy, we came across a bottle of 40% German vodka which was, and I believe still is, being sold at 0.7L for £6.99. Now…. The mixer.

We paced up and down the isles trying to decipher the cheap knock-off labels and work out what the hell we were buying when we happened across something special…..

Tiger Energy Drink! It shined and unholy orange shine with a big pissed off tiger on the front of it, it looked absolutely awesome the can itself looked like it was about to fuck you up. We then looked at the back and to our utter astonishment it was chemically, identical to red bull, in nutrient, ingredient and, all importantly, caffeine levels. Then there was the price – a student friendly 24p per can. It was at this point it was clear what we should do. The math’s was quickly done and we concluded that one crate… 24 cans would cost £5.76. Picking up one delivery crate each we stumbled to the tills and made our purchase.

Though neither of us had said it, we both knew what would be happening tonight… at that price how could we NOT try and drink a whole crate in one sitting.

We got home, crate in hand, and grin on face. Sat down and opened the first can. It smelt like acidic death… we poured some in to our cheap German vodka…. It looked like bright orange tramp piss. We tasted some…. It burned, far too sweet, yet far too acidic at the same time. Like drinking pure sucrose mixed with bright orange tramp piss mixed with acidic death.

As the night progressed we each slowly made our way through our crate, sinking one after another, gradually REDUCING the amount of vodka just to see if we could actually drink that much caffeine. As time went on I noticed my heart start to beat faster and faster. It felt strange but it was clearly nothing I couldn’t handle, not when I had my friend to beat. So I drank faster and faster and my heart began to beat more and more. ¾ of the way (18 cans) and I went to the toilet. Pissing bright orange tramp pissy acidic death, my heart hammering away in time to the finest 1000bpm jungle gabba I began to feel like I couldn’t go on.

It will not end this way I told myself. Sod my health and my heart. I will not be beaten by a crate of cheap stimulant. I ran out of the room, bounced off the sofa with finest matrix wall running skills landing gracefully on my intended sofa (at least in my mind that’s what I did, I was reliably informed the next day I came stumbling into the room at speed, hit one sofa, slammed my face into the wall and collapsed like a sack of shit onto the other sofa) Quickly sat up and downed the last 6 cans one after another in quick succession. A short while later my friend too finished his crate and we sat in triumph staring at the wreckage of the room and congratulating ourselves on one of the most pointless and stupid things we had done so far in our short lives.

Then there was the aftermath, rocking backwards and forwards, the paranoia, the sweats, the giggles, the “why oh why were we so stupid to have done this”, the genuine terror at the fact our hearts were beating so fast and we couldn’t stop it. We were surly going to die. The morning came and went, the afternoon came and went, then evening the next day rolled around and we were still sitting there, awake for over 48 hours, still buzzing, still panicking that we were about to die any second.

Eventually it wore off, we thanked the great sky people and the various gods that we had begun to pray to that we were still alive and vowed never to do anything as stupid as that again…..

The next weekend we went straight to Lidl and brought another two crates of the stuff

And the weekend after that…

And the weekend after that….

For nearly 3 months, almost every weekend we sat down with 24 cans of cheap red-bull knock-off and drank until we felt our hearts exploding in our chests. Every weekend we vowed never to do it again, but kept coming back for more… I have no idea why we did it to ourselves….

It was just so cheap…..
(The_Mighty_Spleen, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 21:18, 1 reply)

I worked out LD50 for energy drinks at work one day.
For an 8-and-a-half stone person, assuming caffeine toxicity scales up from mice, then drinking between 45 and 50 cans in six to eight hours will have a 50% chance of killing you.

Christ, I really never thought I'd find a use for that bit of knowledge.
(wellgroomedwookiee is a filthy-minded hobgoblin, Mon 28 Jul 2008, 22:38, closed)