Pippins question box

I was browsing around and I happen to pass Pippin' blog. I had a couple spare minutes so I tried her question box. I clicked on the link and chose drug effects (because I just finished Health class) and then caffeine because it is a very familiar name. When the page came up the first line I read was "In massive doses, caffeine is lethal.". That was enough to scare me! Of course, after I thought about it, I realized that massive doses of a lot of things can be lethal. The site defines a lethal dose as about 80 -100 cups of coffee, one-after-another. That is a lot of coffee! It also says that caffeine causes physical dependency. I already knew this because I have had a few teachers that used to walk in cranky and blame it on the absense of expresso powder in their house. But, the thing that shocked me was that the withdrawal symptoms (headache, fatigue and muscle pain) can show up in 24 hours of the last time you consumed caffeine. That means if you are depending on caffeine and you don't have caffeine in 24 hours since the last time you did, you are not going to have a good day. I really thought that caffeine was basically harmless, but I got proved wrong (BIG time!) .

links :
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/caff.html