The recent controversy about Anheuser-Busch's "Spykes" energy drinks has prompted grassroots advocacy as well as broader concerns about mixing alcohol and energy drinks.

Sold in pocket-sized bottles and containing 12 percent alcohol, Spykes is being marketed as an additive for beer and other alcoholic beverages. "Spykes is a great alternative to hard liquor shots," according to the Anheuser-Busch product website for Spykes. "A Spykes pour takes beer up a notch by adding a caffeinated rush and a sweet taste that finishes hot ... Spykes gives your beer a kick, adds flavor to your drink, and is perfect for a shot."

But critics see the product's bright packaging and fruity flavors -- Spicy Lime, Hot Chocolate, Spicy Mango, and Hot Melons -- as a blatant attempt to market the product to children. Hope Taft, former first lady of Ohio and a board member of the group Leadership to Keep Children Alcohol Free, dashed off a March 30 letter to Anheuser-Busch president and CEO August Busch IV to protest Spykes' "appeal to those under the age of 21."

"It is colorful, flavorful and comes in small, easy-to-conceal sizes, just the qualities today's teenagers are looking for," wrote Taft, who has a long track record in youth drug prevention. "With high-school prom season fast approaching, even your marketing suggests its appeal to underage kids by suggesting 'slipping it into a tiny purse or tuxedo jacket.' The vast majority of tux jackets are worn by high school students this time of year."

"Please be responsible corporate citizens and stop selling Spykes," implored Taft.

Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) chairman Arthur Dean also wrote a letter to company executives calling for Spykes to be pulled from the market. "It is hard to believe that Anheuser-Busch does not intentionally market to people under 21 when a product with the flavoring, marketing, and price point of Spykes appears on the market," wrote Dean.

Joseph Califano, chairman and president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, called Spykes "a predatory move to attract underage drinking," comparing marketing of the product to Reynolds Tobacco's attempts to sell sweet-flavored cigarettes in the U.S. -- another product slammed for appealing to kids.

"No 30- or 40-year-old beer drinker is going to add hot chocolate or some other flavor to make beer more palatable, but kids will and when they do they will get two drinks in one," said Califano.

Call for Local Advocacy

CADCA has launched a letter-writing campaign targeting Anheuser-Busch and local distributors and retailers, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) also sent out an action alert urging prevention groups to contact their local Anheuser-Busch distributors and alcohol retailers to ask them to stop selling Spykes.

"Anheuser-Busch is practically begging to be investigated, subpoenaed, sued, or hauled before a Congressional committee to explain this one," said CSPI Alcohol Policies Project director George Hacker.

To that end, CSPI also wrote to members of the National Association of Attorneys General's (NAAG) Youth Access to Alcohol Task Force asking them to investigate Spykes, and is urging local health groups to do the same. Jessica Maurer, special assistant to Maine Attorney General Steve Rowe, co-chair of the NAAG task force, said that the panel is "terribly concerned about Spykes" and other products that mix alcohol and energy drinks. "This is the worst tip of the iceberg, but there's a whole iceberg under there," she said of Spykes.

The brewer's response to the flap has hardly been conciliatory. Francine I. Katz, vice president of communications and consumer affairs for Anheuser-Busch, said Spykes is being marketed to "adult consumers" who are "looking for innovative alcohol beverages to match their active lifestyles" and attributed the criticism of Spykes to "perennial, fear-mongering anti-alcohol groups whose members are in the business of spreading misinformation."

She added: "Those who are concerned about the concealability of small containers should focus on those hard-liquor beverages [such as airline "mini-bottles"] already on the market that have three to four times greater concentration of alcohol by volume than Spykes."

The Oregon Partnership, a member of CADCA, was among the first groups to raise a red flag about Spykes, which hit store shelves in January. As a results of the Partnership's advocacy, beer distributors in Oregon agreed in February to stop selling Spykes. That victory helped generate widespread media coverage of the Spykes controversy as well as additional grassroots activity.

Most recently, the town of West Bridgewater, Mass., this week passed a local ordinance banning the sale of Spykes. "We need to reach out to our community and surrounding towns ... to get a similar ban there and hope that it's a chain reaction throughout the state," West Bridgewater Selectman Jerry Lawrence told WBZ-TV on April 10.

The Larger Problem: Alcohol and Energy Drinks

Critics say that beyond the issues of Spykes' kid-friendly packaging and marketing (the product website includes free Spykes instant-messenger icons and cellphone ringtones) lies the larger problem of mixing alcohol and energy drinks.

"This is not just about giving people a sense of well-being and alertness," said CSPI's Hacker, "but making people believe that they are capable of continuing their alcohol consumption." Hacker said the ultimate goal for Anheuser-Busch is to sell more alcohol, pointing to a comment posted on the Spykes website (since removed) from a purported Spykes drinker, stating: "I can drink these all day, and be ready to go out and party all night."

Despite an ingredient list that includes the stimulants caffeine, guarana, and ginseng -- all commonly found in energy drinks -- Anheuser-Busch's Katz said that Spykes "is neither a high-alcohol content drink, nor an energy drink," adding that each serving has about the same amount of alcohol as a third of a glass of wine and about as much caffeine as in an ounce of dark chocolate.

Industry experts say that the introduction of Spykes is Anheuser-Busch's reaction to the popular practice of mixing energy drinks like Red Bull with vodka and other liquor/energy drink combinations that have eroded the market share for beer. "I'm afraid this is the first wave of what we're going to see in the future," said Judy Cushing, executive director of the Oregon Partnership. "Why can't the industry just stick with producing adult beverages? Are they getting desperate?"

Concern about the danger of mixing energy drinks and alcohol is nothing new: as far back as 2001, researcher David Pearson of Ball State University's Human Performance Laboratory was warning that mixing the stimulants in energy drinks with the depressant alcohol could lead to cardiopulmonary and cardiovascular health problems. Since then, a number of other energy drinks premixed with alcohol have hit the marketplace, including Anheuser-Busch's own Tilt, P.I.N.K. Vodka, Liquid Core, and Liquid Charge.

In the April 2006 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, Brazilian researchers reported that people who combined alcohol and Red Bull tended to overlook the extent of their alcohol impairment because the energy drink made them feel so awake.

"Although combined ingestion decreases the sensation of tiredness and sleepiness, objective measures of motor coordination showed that it cannot reduce the harmful effects of alcohol on motor coordination," said researcher Maria Lucia O. Souza-Formigoni of the Federal University of Sao Paulo. "In other words, the person is drunk but does not feel as drunk as he really is. The second important point is that many users reported using energy drinks to reduce a not-so-pleasant taste of alcoholic beverages, which could dangerously increase the amount (as well as the speed of ingestion) of alcoholic beverages."

Researchers expressed particular concern that those who mix alcohol and energy drinks could be more likely to drink and drive.

Maurer told Join Together that the NAAG Youth Access to Alcohol Task Force has "actually been looking into the issue of energy drinks combined with alcohol long before the recent controversy about Spykes." The panel has found, for example, that a number of other nations actively discourage consumers from combining energy drinks with alcohol, including through warning labels on product packages. The public attention and awareness generated by the introduction of Spykes could help pave the way for future action on the broader issue of alcohol and energy drinks, suggested Maurer.