Making good on their claim to give you wings – sweaty, jittery, shit-talking wings, the sale of Red Bull has been banned in Six German states after traces of Cocaine were found in the popular energy drink.
BBC News Reports: (Red Bull) said coca leaf extracts were used worldwide as a natural flavouring, and that its own tests had found no traces of cocaine.
The illegal cocaine alkaloid – one of 10 found in coca and representing only 0.8% of the plant’s chemical make-up – is chemically removed before use, as mandated by international anti-narcotics agencies.
“There is no scientific basis for this ban on Red Bull Cola because the levels of cocaine found are so small,” Fritz Soergel, the head of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg, Bavaria, told Time magazine.
“And it’s not even cocaine itself. According to the tests we carried out, it’s a non-active degradation product with no effect on the body. If you start examining lots of other drinks and food so carefully, you’d find a lot of surprising things.”
Red Bull can now be considered the most unassuming gateway drug known to man and perhaps the only product besides other drugs where the remark “this is so good there must be coke in it” is actually true.
