Caffeine - Downmarket Fentanyl

Caffeine can be like downmarket fentanyl, a threat to people with certain heart issues - particularly long QT syndrome - and including people like myself. Drink manufacturers put caffeine into drinks where you don't expect it - into citrusy lemonades and orangeades - and then label it poorly or not at all. Customers don't realize they are being threatened. Time to start suing people's asses off:

Panera is being sued again after another customer is said to have died after consuming the chain’s caffeinated lemonade.

Dennis Brown was a 46-year-old man with a chromosomal deficiency disorder, ADHD and high blood pressure who avoided energy drinks, according to a wrongful death complaint filed this week by his mother, brother and sister. A loyal Panera customer, he started regularly ordering “charged lemonade” in late September, according to the suit.

On October 9, Brown, who had a mild intellectual disability and blurry vision along with developmental delay but lived independently, ordered a charged lemonade and is believed to have refilled his cup twice over the course of about an hour and a half, the suit said. He suffered a cardiac event on his walk home and was pronounced dead at the scene when found unresponsive. 

The complaint resembles another wrongful death suit filed earlier this year by the parents of Sarah Katz, a 21-year-old woman who died in September 2022 after drinking Panera’s charged lemonade. Katz was diagnosed with a heart condition called long QT syndrome when she was five years old, and managed symptoms by taking medication and limiting caffeine, according to that lawsuit.