A few months ago, I moved to Spain from a country that tends to treat its citizens as children. Throughout my whole life, the government has always wanted to protect me and my fellow citizens from every “harm”, and people have long learned how to navigate under the circumstances.
I came to Spain with the belief that it would be a country more open to educating the public rather than introducing blanket bans. I had to find out that policy-makers are no different here. The country’s plan to ban energy drinks for under‑16s is a classic case of “do something, look tough, change little.” It treats teenagers as problems to be managed rather than citizens in training.
As a former teacher and a father of 5 children, I have learned that commanding and ordering teens around is easier than teaching them to be critical. But in the long run, it does not pay off. At 14 or 15, young people are already making real choices about what they consume, how they sleep, and how they perform at school and in sports. A ban doesn’t suddenly make those choices disappear; it just pushes them out of sight. Instead of buying an energy drink on the way to school, they’ll get an older friend to do it, or drink it at home. The behavior moves, the habit stays.
Yes, energy drinks are caffeinated, often sugary beverages that can be overused, but so can coffee, cola, or screens. When governments lump everything into the “public sins” basket, teenagers quickly learn to tune out. If you exaggerate the risk of energy drinks, why should they trust you when you talk about something genuinely dangerous?
My experience shows that education is slower and less glamorous than a ban, but it works better. Give teenagers clear information about caffeine, sleep, and stress, show them how to read a label, involve parents and schools, and many will adjust their behavior on their own. That’s how responsibility is formed: not by eliminating every risk, but by learning to navigate them.
There’s also a deeper cost to prohibition. A society built on bans becomes a society afraid of choice. Every time the state steps in with “you can’t handle this,” it lowers the expectation that individuals should think for themselves. Today it’s energy drinks, tomorrow it’s something else, and the circle of “allowed” choices keeps shrinking.
I genuinely believe that Spain has better options. It could introduce simple, prominent labeling for caffeine and sugar. You can have school-based programs on sleep, nutrition, and stimulants. And maybe communities can invest in sports and after-school activities that make the “quick fix in a can” less attractive.
I know that those paths are harder to sell at a press conference, but they do something a ban never will: they raise the level of understanding. Taking cans off shelves is easy. Helping young people develop judgment is harder. If we care about the kind of citizens we’re raising, the goal shouldn’t be fewer visible cans of energy drinks. There should be more young people who can explain why they choose to put one back.