Comment by inigyou

You're making the mistake of assuming it has something to do with the caffeine content or caffeine being illegal.

There's one pattern that all these rules have in common: Someone noticed a problem, so they added friction to try and reduce the problem. People are getting fucked up on Red Bull? Add friction to buying a Red Bull. People aren't getting fucked up on coffee? Then don't add friction to coffee. I know us engineer personalities would like to define uniform rules for all caffeinated products or not define any rules, and that's what you should do if you are making a medical robot to maintain someone's caffeine level, but that isn't really how the social world works. It's a quite straightforward loop of observation->response.