First of all, we want to acknowledge Mr. Shepherd's testimony as well, because it's bringing forward information from individual cases on which we can base early signals and trends to start doing research.
In answer to your basic question, there really isn't good information collected in the literature to date that would support any ban on energy drinks based on intoxication, dependence, or those kinds of things.
But we do have case reports. We receive case reports that are spontaneous adverse reaction reports, because in Canada we regulate these products as drugs. In other countries, where they're regulated as food and food supplements, there are perhaps less well organized systems, although, as was testified, there have been reports that have been looked at by various other agencies.
In Canada, we have to date 60 serious adverse reaction reports involving energy drinks across all the different product types. Of these, 15 are cardiac, which is a matter of concern, but then you have to go down to what the level of precision is in the report, and unfortunately—for example, we use a World Health Organization classification system as “probable, possible, or unassessable”—we have had two reports of death as an outcome. These are suspicions; they're not proven. The reports on the deaths, both of which were said to be associated with arrhythmia, are incomplete in terms of definitely assigning causality, or in other words, in saying that it's certain that the product caused the reaction.
That's part of the early days of this, but what it does do is push us towards more research and allows us to focus the research, and then to build scientific evidence on which we can take better decisions. We started in 2005 with “It's Your Health”, which identified that there are reports; we're trying to communicate this to Canadians so they can make choices.