Red Bull paid scientists to argue against energy drink bans. It worked for a decade.

On a February day in 2011, in a hearing room on Long Island, the beach towns that inspired Jaws, a Dutch academic from Utrecht University named Joris Verster told Suffolk County lawmakers that regulating energy drink sales to minors was as illogical as blaming shark attacks on summertime ice cream sales. The room laughed. The lawmakers dropped the proposed age limit.

All three scientists who testified that day had been paid by Red Bull.

That scene, documented in a nine-outlet joint investigation published Wednesday, anchors a decade-long pattern. For more than a decade before and after the hearing, Red Bull paid what the investigation describes as hundreds of thousands of dollars to university professors for research favorable to the energy drink industry, flew academics to U.S. cities, and provided talking points for meetings with officials weighing restrictions. The Examination, The Bristol Cable, Daraj, Investico, Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel, Der Standard, the Toronto Star, and STAT published the work together; a separate Examination piece describes the AI-assisted document analysis behind it.

The Suffolk County hearing came weeks after the Food and Drug Administration had effectively banned Four Loko, a caffeinated malt liquor college students called "blackout in a can." County lawmakers were weighing whether to stop selling high-caffeine drinks to minors. Verster, and Red Bull's chief scientific officer argued there was no scientific basis for the restriction. Suffolk dropped the proposal.

The reporting traces a more specific mechanism. Red Bull did not just pay skeptics. The company funded researchers who systematically detached the energy drink from the alcohol-mixing harm the public was actually worried about, shifting the regulatory target onto the drinker, the mixer, or "more research needed." The Jaws analogy is the reframe in miniature: the energy drink is ice cream, the harm is the shark, and causation belongs to whoever is in the water.

De Groene Amsterdammer, a Dutch investigative outlet, separately drew a parallel between Red Bull's strategy and the tobacco industry's use of paid science. The BMJ had already raised a similar comparison in its own coverage of industry-funded work on energy drinks and alcohol. The peer-reviewed literature on the underlying question is mixed: a study indexed on PubMed Central found that consumers who mixed alcohol with energy drinks reported drinking more and suffering more negative consequences than those drinking alcohol alone, though the field has not converged on a single mechanism. The CDC and the European Food Safety Authority have both maintained public guidance on caffeine and on mixing alcohol with caffeine. That guidance sets the public-health baseline the industry-funded research was contesting.

What Suffolk County heard in 2011 is what European regulators, state lawmakers, and municipal officials kept hearing for the next decade. The room laughed once. The pattern held.