"Blackout in a can" sounds like a college kid's dream, if you ask me. Too bad the manufacturers of Four Loko didn't think to use that name before their product hit the market. Now, all Phusion Products can do now is anticipate the stream of states, cities and institutions that will attempt to completely eliminate "blackout in a can" within their legal boundaries. Thus far, the most relevant politicians (at least, to us) to address the real danger of Four Loko have been Boston City Councilors John Connolly and Mark Ciommo. These two have co-sponsored a request for a hearing on Four Loko to "investigate and examine the health risks posed to Boston residents by Four Loko and like caffeinated alcoholic beverages," according to the order. Yesterday, The Boston Globe quoted Connolly saying, "This is a situation when you know a young person is going to die at some point if we don't get this out of the marketplace."

Let's be realistic for a minute. Death as a result of alcohol poisoning could happen at any given time on any given college campus. College students don't need Four Loko to effectively erase from memory every detail of a Saturday night.

When stress hits, students have plenty of easy-access legal substances to grab. Trouble occasionally arrives when the legal substances won't cut it, and students have to pull a couple of strings to access illegal substances. Regardless, they'll get them if they want them-at a range of prices. Time has proven that this is just the nature of college life. It therefore makes very little sense to place an explicit ban on Four Loko.

Now, I wasn't there for Prohibition, and I entered the world somewhat in the middle of the marijuana legalization saga. So it's pretty interesting to witness the government grapple with the logic behind "banning" a substance. It seems to me-and you'll have to take my inexperienced word on this-that instituting a ban on something just places a veil of secrecy over that something without effectively eliminating it. In the larger scheme of banned substances, this veil of secrecy often incurs some legal risks and a lot of undercover financial schemes.

Particularly in a college context, banning things also seems to make that something even more prevalent. In this microcosm of society, our first identification with "the law" is in our dormitories: Community advisors institute the "rules" on alcohol and drug consumption (based on a combination of state and federal law and normal college campus "exceptions" to the law) with varying degrees of flexibility. As a result, we perceive legal authorities on campus from a distance. Do we really believe that even the most dedicated team of CAs could realistically handle each and every violation of dry-quad standards? The truth is that they can't, so they don't. And that makes a stressed-out student's Friday night activities much easier to accomplish.

So Four Loko isn't going anywhere. The media, which naturally jumped on the telling phrase "blackout in a can" surrounding the product, will likely only exacerbate its unfortunate appeal. Of course, the carefree stupidity of college students doesn't overshadow the physiologically harmful effects of Four Loko. And Four Loko has this one great feature going for it, too: it's cheap. For a mere 3 dollars, consumers recieve the equivalent of an all-inclusive package of six beers, five large cups of coffee and some tacky, artificial, sugar-loaded flavors. While a ban would theoretically discourage people from the risks associated with Four Loko, I believe that in reality the problems would remain-especially if Four Loko were rendered illegal on college campuses.

An outright ban seems more like a knee-jerk reaction than a productive solution. Connolly and Ciommo mean well for the generally young residents of the city of Boston, but the hearing seems to stem more from paranoia than anything else.

Because of the natural appeal Four Loko has to college students, college administrations should take responsibility for figuring out how to handle all the rage surrounding it. And this is exactly what Dean of Student Life Rick Sawyer did-send out an informative message to the student body containing the product's possible risks and advice about safe courses of action. Every school has a different party scene and social atmosphere; nonetheless, colleges and universities should take the time to educate their students in a friendly, appropriate manner instead of rushing to render this now-popular substance illegal and duly attractive.