Story by Kelly Mills Photo illustrations by Melissa Gaug

It’s been a long night of partying and drinking. Most of the people at the college house party are tiring, but two men and a woman stand at the kitchen counter with a glass of Red Bull and a shot of Jägermeister.

“1, 2, 3… go!” one cries, dropping the shot in the glass of Red Bull and drinking it quickly.

It’s called a Jäger bomb, and it’s one of an increasing number of alcoholic beverages incorporating energy drinks that are designed to give drinkers the needed boost to stay up longer and maintain a more constant level of energy during a night of drinking.

Red Bull mixed with Jägermeister or vodka is just one of the popular energy-alcohol combos. BE, Budweiser’s beer combined with energy boosters like caffeine, ginseng and guarana, and Sparks, a malt beverage containing caffeine and taurine, are two other popular drinks.

Garrison Cummings, a student at Lorain County Community College, had a particularly bad experience with Sparks. “I was shaking for a few hours. I couldn’t sit still,” he says. “I had involuntary spasms, and I puked.” Cummings says he drank 12 cans of Sparks on New Year’s Eve and had a reaction to the amount of caffeine and other ingredients in his body. He describes his symptoms as mild to moderate.

Although he was not scared off by the effects the drink had on him, the drinks are certainly less tempting now. “I don’t care for them too much,” he says. “After that night, they’re just not that appealing.”

It is a myth that caffeine reduces a drinker’s intoxication level, says Scott Dotterer, coordinator of the office of College Health Behavior at Kent State. He says people often think that coffee will help them sober up because of the caffeine, but it won’t. He says the same holds true for energy drinks. “(An energy drink) might make the person a little more awake, but it’s not going to change the intoxication level of that person,” Dotterer says.

Pete Ritchey, pharmacist at the DeWeese Health Center, says one problem many people face when combining energy drinks with alcohol is not knowing what they are drinking in an energy drink and how it will affect them. “Natural products often do not list the ingredients and the amounts,” Ritchey says. “If you stay with a reputable energy drink, it will tell you what is in it and how much, and you can judge what you can drink from there.”

Patrice Radden, Red Bull’s director of corporate communications, says in an e-mail interview that people who don’t understand the effects of what they are drinking are more likely to have problems, but it is not the energy components that cause the problem. “There is no reason why Red Bull Energy Drink should not, like any other drink, be mixed with alcohol, as long as people do not underestimate that alcohol consumption might impair their mental and physical activities. Red Bull Energy Drink is not designed to counteract this,” she wrote.

Paul Weaver, junior special and health education major, says he combines alcohol and energy drinks often. He has Jäger bombs a few times a month and BE every couple of weeks.

Weaver is not concerned with the side effects of energy drinks, including in combination with alcohol. “Being in health education and everything, we studied stuff like that,” Weaver says. “I’ve never really felt any negative side effects. Until I do, I’ll probably keep drinking them. That or until I puke off of them.”