A Bright Out

Recently "Casual" stimulants have moved into the mainstream of societal consumption. Caffeine and it's nefarious predecessors are sold at the recently debuted Nocto Cafes that are popping up all along the west coast. Within these new social drinking establishments the genre of "casual" stimulant beverages has taken hold of its quickly expanding demographic with surprising tenacity. Nocto Cafes serve a myriad of what used to be known as energy drinks but are now more commonly labeled psychoactive beverages.

These type of drinks are finding a niche in society akin to the niche held by alcoholic beverages. But instead of acting as social lubricant like alcohol, these psychoactive drinks act more like social nitros, pushing people to new heights of energy and sensation. Made with stimulants closely related to caffeine, some psychoactive beverages still simply keep individuals running when they would otherwise be down for the count, however, many of the drinks developed in the past few years heighten sensations along with the energy supplementation.

It's these sorts of drinks that when taken with too much volume and/or frequency that induce a new medical phenomenon known as a bright out. The "bright out" is named such due to its parallels with black outs induced through excessive alcohol consumption. However a bright out has a much different array of effects. An individual experiencing a bright out is often met with mild visual hypersensitivity, and intense synethesia, a condition where one form of stimulation causes another form of sensation, for instance where hearing a sound produces a visualization of a color, the synethesia can manifest in many different ways from auditory/visual to tactile/olfactory and so on. Unlike black outs though, after a bright out, memory is retained, though confused and often dream like. However, the potential mental dangers of bright outs are just as bad if not worse than black outs and are not to be ignored. Unfortunately for their growing following Nocto Cafes may find themselves being policed into extinction before they spread beyond the west coast.