Have you had too much? Naturally!

After the publication of an allegedly “secret formula” which listed alcohol as an ingredient in Coca Cola, a Muslim man in Israel has filed a huge class action lawsuit against the company:

An Israeli Muslim filed a NIS 1.2 billion class action suit against The Central Bottling Company Group Ltd. (the Israel franchisee for Coca Cola) in the Jerusalem District Court today for compensation for mental anguish and infringing the independent choices of the individual.

The plaintiff, an Israeli Muslim, filed the suit following publication on the web last week of what is apparently the secret recipe of Coca Cola, and which allegedly contains alcohol. The class action suit was filed by Advs. Hani Tannus, Ofir Cohen, and Mahmud Machjana.

Alcohol is forbidden by Islam, and the plaintiff cites he has been unwittingly drinking alcohol for years. He therefore claims Coca Cola is guilty of misleading consumers, infringing the independent choices of the individual, and causing huge mental anguish.

The plaintiff says that his class action suit comprises NIS 1,000 compensation for each of the 1.2 million Muslims living in Israel.

The suit said, “This is one of the greatest deceptions in the history of consumer affairs, when a company ignores the existence of alcohol as an ingredient despite being aware that the Muslim world abstains from products like these. This is a very serious matter and it certainly won’t be the last in the world in light of the fraud.

Aside from the fact that it’s loony, I see several problems with the lawsuit. First, Coca Cola denies that the drink contains any alcohol at all, and denies that the secret recipe is in fact the one which was published. Second, even if it had minute traces of alcohol, many sodas use minute amounts of alcohol as a fixative in the flavoring process, but they are classified as non-alcoholic because it is simply not possible to consume them and have the alcohol cause any effect at all. Trace amounts of alcohol are present in many flavorings and they cannot cause intoxication. Accordingly, they are not required to list alcohol as an ingredient on the label.

Non-alcoholic beer contains small amounts of alcohol (less than .05%) and is sold legally in Saudi Arabia, because it is not possible to get drunk from it. Whatever trace amounts of alcohol a soft drink might contain would be considerably less than that. 

Coca Cola has been subject of a huge rumor-mongering campaign in the Mideast, with ridiculous paranoid conspiracy claims. As The Economist points out, there are implications beyond Coca Cola:

IF YOU Google the phrase “Middle East rumours”, the first link that pops up is not, as you might expect, a website propagating conspiracy theories. It is Coca-Cola’s website. For several years now the company has struggled to rebut ridiculous rumours about its products.

For example, some people believe that if you read Coke’s Arabic logo backwards, it says: “No Muhammad, No Mecca”. Others insist that the company is owned by Jews, or that it bankrolls Israel. These rumours are one reason why Coke does worse than Pepsi in Arab countries. Yet they are all false, as Coke’s website explains in painstaking detail.

Such rebuttals are unwise, argue Derek Rucker and David Dubois, of the Kellogg School of Management, and Zakary Tormala, of Stanford business school, three psychologists. By restating the rumours, Coke helps to propagate them. Its web page is a magnet for search engines. And people who read rebuttals tend to forget the denial and remember only the rumour, says Mr Rucker.

As information is passed around, important qualifiers are lost. A rumour may start as “I’m not sure if this is true, but I heard that…” Then it evolves into: “I heard that…” Finally it becomes: “Did you know that…?” Even when no one intends to spread falsehoods, they spread.

In several experiments, Mr Rucker and Mr Dubois planted rumours among undergraduates. They found that with each repetition, scepticism diminished. The rumours themselves did not change; only the likelihood that the students would believe them. These findings were published in a report called “The Failure to Transmit Certainty”.

This image went viral in the Mideast a few years ago:

The travails of Coca Cola aside, I don’t like the idea of Muslims suing any company over trace amounts of alcohol in products. Especially if the ban on alcohol is intended to prohibit intoxication, it seems specious, and I hope the Israeli court slam-dunks it on its face, because all that should matter is the simple fact that Cokes will not get a person drunk, no matter how many are consumed.

What’s really intriguing about alcohol is that because it occurs in nature as a result of the breakdown of sugar by yeast, trace amounts of it are in all sorts of things, and not just bottles of juice that sit too long in the refrigerator.

Because our bodies contain sugar and yeast, we humans are also subject to having trace amounts of alcohol in our systems without any control over it. Not only may it not be possible to avoid alcohol, but under certain conditions, some people manufacture enough alcohol in their bodies that they become legally intoxicated, and would be subject to prosecution under the DUI laws! I am absolutely not making this up: 

In an interesting scientific article, two physicians at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore reported that they detected the odor of beer in three of their patients. This was in an isolated hospital setting; there was no access to alcoholic beverages. The doctors had urine samples taken and analyzed by gas chromatography. Result? All three showed the presence of alcohol in their systems. Two of these were then tested for actual blood-alcohol concentration (BAC). One showed a BAC of .043%. The other was .121% — or 1 1/2 times the legal limit for DUI!

The post includes a technical explanation, and notes that while endogenous alcohol is normal, the “wide inter-individual variation in healthy abstaining individuals is hard to explain.”

But because of the law, even if your alcohol is your own natural internal brew, you are still liable for prosecution:  

How many folks, with “immaculately conceived” alcohol in their systems, have been arrested and convicted for DUI? These people were innocent, right?

Wrong. In the rush to convict drunk drivers (and with federal pushing), 49 states have now passed so-called “per se” laws: driving with a BAC of .08% or more. Neither intent, negligence or even knowledge is required. The crime consists of simply having the alcohol in your body.  Even if you’ve had nothing to drink.

So, while some of us are legally “guiltier” than others, that the human body makes endogenous alcohol seems to be a little reported fact:

The human body produces its own supply of alcohol naturally on a continuous basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s called endogenous ethanol production. Therefore, we always have alcohol in our bodies and in some cases people produce enough to become legally intoxicated and arrested for DUI.

As to why this isn’t better known, I have a funny feeling that it might be unwelcome, and above all destructive to the narrative in certain quarters. And I don’t mean just fatwa-issuing Muslims, but fatwa-issuing MADD activists and assorted fatuous “zero tolerance” Neo-prohibitionist types.

Think about it. If endogenous alcohol means there is no such thing as a natural born teetotaler, then zero tolerance means one hundred percent intolerance!