WASHINGTON – The Washington Post wrote this week about America’s obsession with caffeine, including increasingly frequent incidents of caffeine overdoses. To keep up with the desire for more caffeine, delivered more efficiently, “an entire industry sprang up,” writes the Post, developing a range of products from energy drinks and caffeinated gum, to "Stay Awake" pills and even a pure, powdered form meant to be mixed into food.

However, according to the Post, the new caffeinated products have led to a rash of thousands of overdoses and reports of addiction and withdrawal, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has become so alarmed that it has mounted an aggressive effort to warn consumers about the risks of caffeine products and to take manufacturers to task for the way those products are marketed.

In 2012, the FDA began investigating the deaths of 13 people preliminarily linked to a caffeinated dietary supplement 5-hour Energy and the following year, talks with the FDA prompted Wrigley to stop producing its caffeinated gum. More recently, this week the FDA warned five distributors of pure powdered caffeine that they are selling products that are "dangerous" and "present a significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury to consumers."

In fact, writes the Post, “the issue is so much on everyone's mind that in 2013, when the new bible of American psychiatry—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5 for short—was released, "caffeine withdrawal" was added as a bona fide mental health disorder—a move that practically guarantees billing codes for insurance company reimbursement.” And apparently added scrutiny by the FDA.