I have bad news, kids. Four Loko has been banned.

I’ll wait for you to stop crying before I continue.

You good? OK, now wipe the tears from your eyes so you can read this clearly.

Four Loko has been the scapegoat for angry parents and ass-kissing legislators for a while now. With its combination of alcohol and caffeine, Four Loko is definitely not something to remember. Because you literally will not remember anything after you drink it.

But banning Four Loko seems like the lazy way to do things, when the act of drinking Four Loko until you black out is both a result of our culture and an act that can be prevented by responsibility.

Not to mention it is a choice, a freedom that, while entirely stupid, has now been taken away from us.

Yes, it has been proven that mixing such high doses of both a stimulant and a depressant can have toxic effects on the human body. However, cigarettes have been proven to kill people and yet not a single state has banned the sale of them.

Yes, the effects of cigarettes take a much longer time to kill than imbibing oneself on Four Loko, but the end result is still the same. Death. There are plenty of things that are harmful to the human body and ultimately result in death.

But where are the angry, torch-wielding mobs ranting and raving about MSG in Doritos or the dangerous chemicals contained in candy wrappers?

Sure, Four Loko has become the poster child for drinking in excess. And parents’ panties are all in a twist because their high school age kids are dying or almost dying while drinking it in the not-so-dense woods of Long Island.

Maybe I’m just saying this because I’ve got two retired cops for parents who threatened to breathalyze me every time I came home, but parents do have a hand in what their kids do.

Gasp! Wait, do I mean parents can actually prevent their children from drinking in excess?! Yes, yes I do.

My parents were absolute party Nazis when I was in high school; they stalked the houses where I told them I would be, they called the parents of kids I was hanging out with. But it worked. If I went out, I would take only a sip of a beer to guarantee my ass wouldn’t be in serious trouble when I got home.

I never got wasted or took drugs simply because I loved my computer and my Xbox too much and did not want them taken away from me for eternity.

On the flip side, U.S. legislation is entirely to blame for this binge-drinking epidemic. Drinking has become a taboo, with our country banning it until you are a certain age and even trying to banish it altogether.

For people in other countries, especially Europe, drinking is naturally a part of their culture. Italian teenagers have a glass of wine with dinner and continue on with their lives, maybe even doing homework afterward.

But this drinking taboo has made American kids have different expectations of alcohol ‘ if something is so bad that it is banned, then it must really mess you up, right?

We use alcohol as a way to act inappropriately, while other countries simply use it as a drink to compliment dinner.

The simple fact that a human being who can vote, marry, go to war, drive and watch porn while legally having sex with anyone their age or older cannot sit down and have an alcoholic drink is absolutely preposterous.

Maybe if we did not make alcohol out to be the drink of Satan then perhaps binge drinking would not be a problem.

And if that were the case, a simple warning label on a can of Four Loko would seem like a reasonable request, right? Then, just like cigarettes, we would be explicitly aware of what we are putting into our bodies and could make an educated decision on whether or not we wanted to have ourselves a giant can of blackout.

Unfortunately for us, Four Loko will be no longer distributed in New York as of Nov. 19.

But I guess that just means we have to stock up like we’re anticipating a nuclear winter.