Coffee can be a lifesaver in Monday morning staff meetings, but it's also still very much a drug. The actual lethal dose of caffeine is around 150 milligrams per kilogram of your body, translating into roughly 70 average cups of coffee, but this obviously depends on your size, the type of coffee and any underlying medical conditions. Of course, if you consume that amount of coffee, it's the water intoxication that will get you first (which, as we've discussed, is no picnic), but there are ways of getting caffeine into your system. Whilst drinking enough coffee to kill you is probably unfeasible, there have been a number of documented cases of death by energy drink. In 2007, a 28-year-old Australian man went into cardiac arrest after drinking just seven cans of energy drink over a period of seven hours. Sure, that's a lot, but it's significantly less than the 70 lattes you'd have to neck. In 2011, a 14-year-old girl suffered a fatal heart attack after drinking just two cans of Monster energy drink.
