It wasn't until I moved from downtown Madison to this near East Side neighborhood a year ago that I realized how much darker it is on Madison's streets than in Chicago. I and two other Chicago transplants were the first to move into this co-op house after it had been vacated by its previous tenants, and we were taken aback by how dark it got in the house at night.

I first encountered these energy beverages in 2004, a time when I was driving frequently between Chicago and Madison.  My return trips were sometimes kind of late at night--10:30, 11:30 p.m. and there were many instances when I came close to falling asleep at the wheel. At such times, even coffee was insufficient to keep me safely awake.