While Mayor Michael Bloomberg's soda that put limits on big, sugary drinks has been caught up in controversy in New York City, another ban on drink in Chicago is now controversially underway. Different from NY soda ban that gained public attention due to hardcore actions of Mayor Bloomberg despite strong backlash from diverse business organization and interest groups, Chicago's energy drink ban is rather at stalemate. In this paper, I will build up the story of an energy drink ban in the city of Chicago and analyze how this political issue has aroused and why it is currently being ended up stalemate, primarily focusing on political theories in pluralist model. .
Since 2004, at least 18 deaths and 150 injuries have been mentioned in connection with several brands of energy drinks, according to Food and Drug Administration records, though those are only voluntary reports submitted by doctors and consumers.1 In 2011, a 14-year-old girl in Maryland, Anais Fournier died after suffering from cardiac arrest after she had downed two 24-ounce Monster energy drink over a 24-hour period. After her death, in October 2012, the girl's parents, Wendy Crossland and Richard Fournier, sued the maker of Monster Energy Drink, claiming that Monster allegedly failed to warn consumers about the dangers of high-powered energy drink and caffeine in the product contributed to her death. Following the lawsuit, Monster hired a group of doctors to prove that its drinks did not contribute to her death and finally claimed that its doctors found "no medical, scientific or factual evidence to support the Maryland Medical Examiner's report of, "caffeine toxicity,'"2. The company's shares lost more than a quarter of their value within a week after the lawsuit was filed in mid-October, and they haven't climbed back to the pre-suit level. In the meantime of Monster's denial, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had launched an investigation of five deaths that might have been associated with Monster's namesake drinks, though at this point the FDA has not made any determination.
