The inventor of palcohol, an inveterate hiker and camper, envisioned the powdered cocktail as a way to port in a refreshing adult beverage to be enjoyed at the end of a long hike, without the necessity of carrying heavy bottles of liquor and mixers, not to mention shakers and spoons. You just cram a packet, or eleven, of palcohol in your pocket on your way to the top of the mountain, wander around until you find a clear mountain stream, purify its water chemically or by boiling it, mix your drink in one of those annoying collapsible camping cups and then start wondering where the hell the nearest ice machine is located. If there aren't enough bears and snakes in the area already, you can pack in enough cocktails that you'll soon be seeing them in abundance.
I can personally vouch that climbing a mountain will make a person thirsty, which is why whenever I do it, I enjoy the view and the feel of that thin, pristine, glorious mountain air on my face for about five minutes and then hike straight back down to the nearest package store. Palcohol will not change this, I'm afraid—my party beverage of choice is beer, and powdered beer, or "pbeer," is still a long way from being perfected, owing to its immense pronounceability problems.
The promoters of Palcohol insist that the their derailment from the government approval track is only temporary, the result of labeling difficulties, but I suspect there's a "Holy crap—wait a minute" factor involved from government regulators. For one thing, although Palcohol advocates insist piously that their product be used responsibly, like every other booze industry giant does, the average American substance abuser is probably already slavering at the chance to snort his or her next shot. Since the dawn of the cocaine era, Americans have proven that they will put anything up their noses, especially if they think it might be cocaine. If we make Palcohol legal, a significant subset of the population will be walking around with crumbs of banana daiquiri in their mustaches and every Franklin in the land will not only bear traces of coke, but also of Mai Tais.
Also, people will take advantage of the concealability of Palcohol to smuggle their drinks into stadiums and on airplanes, cutting sharply into the profitability of the sports and airline industries, which rely on people consuming plenty of their twelve-dollar cocktails to dull the pain of their teams always losing and their flights always being late.
These are the kinds of issues that have the government grumbling, I suspect, but the United States is the home of freedom, especially freedom to sell stuff, especially if you can afford to purchase a Congressman or two to put the screws on those pesky regulators. I sure hope Palcohol has that kind of money, because I, along with many other Americans, I'm sure, am personally interested in the answer to one question concerning powdered liquor—how many packets will dissolve in a 44-ounce soda?