In The New York Times Magazine: Drank

SLOW PITCH
An ‘anti-energy’ drink’s novel image: chic … or shameful?

This week in Consumed, a beverage containing allegedly relaxing ingredients such as valerian root, melatonin and rose hips, but that skips the health-store image in favor of one striving for  hip-hop chic — and whose name  happens to echo slang for sipping prescription cough syrup.

This has attached some controversy to Drank, as well as to a rival drink called Purple Stuff, made by a different Houston company. “One of the most asinine things I have ever seen,” a public-health professor commented in one Houston Chronicle article that also included complaints from local religious figures and rappers. Not surprising, right? “I’m a little shocked” at the criticism, Peter Bianchi, the inventor of Drank, told me. “We’re not advocating drug use at all,” he continued, but merely offering an innocuous beverage to anyone who feels a little stressed out — carbonated counterprogramming, as it were, to the firmly established “energy drink” category.

Read the column in the January 4, 2009 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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