Coke Bull

Hong Kong officials say they have found traces of cocaine in cans of Red Bull, a few days after Taiwanese authorities confiscated close to 18,000 cases of the popular energy drink - and you can bet they're going to keep it for themselves!

Officials at the Centre for Food Safety said a laboratory analysis found tiny amounts of the drug in samples of "Red Bull Cola," "Red Bull Sugar-free" and "Red Bull Energy Drink". The drink has now been taken off the shelves of major supermarkets, a spokesman said, and added that the amount of cocaine found in the drinks posed little health danger. But damn if they didn't make the drink better. Red Bull moved quickly to deny the findings and said independent tests on the same batch of drinks had found no traces of cocaine.

Yet this comes on the heel's of last week's discovery of trace amounts of coca leaf in Red Bull Cola, resulting in six German states banning the drink. According to authorities, the substance requires the beverage to be classified as a narcotic, requiring a license for sale. (Of course, even Coca-Cola didn't become entirely cocaine-free until 1929.)

Red Bull said coca leaf extracts were used worldwide as a natural flavouring, and that its own tests had found no traces of cocaine. The illegal cocaine alkaloid - one of 10 found in coca and representing only 0.8% of the plant's chemical make-up - is chemically removed before use, as mandated by international anti-narcotics agencies. "There is no scientific basis for this ban on Red Bull Cola because the levels of cocaine found are so small," Fritz Soergel, the head of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg, Bavaria, told Time magazine. "And it's not even cocaine itself. According to the tests we carried out, it's a non-active degradation product with no effect on the body. If you start examining lots of other drinks and food so carefully, you'd find a lot of surprising things."

Red Bull's Asia Pacific marketing director, Daniel Beatty, said the firm strongly disputed the findings. "It would have been absolutely impossible for the Hong Kong or any other authorities to have found traces of cocaine in Red Bull Energy Drink," he said in a statement, and then brushed away some mysterious white substance from his nose. "We expect the Hong Kong authorities to recognize their error soon," he said, adding the firm's representatives were already meeting with Taiwanese authorities to point out the error (possibly with a monetary suggestion).

Meanwhile, Taiwanese authorities ordered the drinks to be removed from shelves pending further investigation.