When Caffeine Attacks

I heard an urban legend once from a friend of mine that several major corporations secretly spike the communal water cooler with amphetamines in the mornings to improve sales and vitality in the office. Looking at it from a strictly production-minded perspective, I can totally understand where they're coming from.

Coming into the office after a prolonged vacation (or a unsanctioned office happy hour that went "longer" than expected), you really notice how vital our country's last legal drug – caffeine – has become to perform even the basic functions and pleasantries around the office. To a lot of people I know, an extra dose (or two or three) of caffeine has become the main way of getting around any number of Life's unpleasantries, combatting boredom, melancholy, cabin fever, work overload, and even sickness.

A friend of mine, unwilling to call out before her winter vacation, made it through an entire week of work while struggling with the flu – how you ask? She dosed herself every hour and a half with a half cup of black coffee, no cream, no sugar, a system she continues to swear by. And who says, its not addictive.

But the bottom line question still arises: can caffeine – the savior of Monday mornings and delayer of hangovers – kill you?

Absolutely! But, ladies and gentleman, let's not lock up the coffee pot just yet.

The experts say you'd have to drink 80 to 100 cups of coffee in rapid succession, which equals about 6 gallons of coffee – approximately 10 to 13 grams of pure caffeine. Even if you could drink that much coffee, the excessive amount of water trapped in your body would kill you first by diluting essential nutrients in your bloodstream. So, while the point is moot, your death is not. Let's not attempt to set new records, shall we?

However, while it takes a lot to kill, it can take significantly less to cause ill effects, and long-term effects of caffeine remain somewhat unclear. Our latest contestant to try their hand at breaching the Caffeine barrier is a young woman in the United Kingdom, who drank seven double-shots of espresso in a mere four hours. The caffeine binge went as most would expect – gasping for breath with a racing heart on the way to the emergency room. She fully recovered within a day from the overdose, and doctors explained she had ingested three times the safe daily amount of caffeine.

With these stats in mind, how big of a role does caffeine play in your daily upkeep? Also, does its documented ill effects keep you from using it to make it through the wee hours of the morning?