Attention cheap wine lovers: you may have to splurge a little now. On March 19, a class-action lawsuit was filed against 28 California wineries — including the creators of Trader Joes' Charles Shaw (a.k.a. "Two-Buck Chuck"), Sutter Home's, Beringer, Cupcake and the most devastating, Franzia — alleging that some of their wines contain dangerously high levels of arsenic. Yes, you heard that right, arsenic.

Kevin Hicks, founder of analyzation lab BeverageGrades, tested 1,300 bottles of wine to better understand their contents and was astonished by his results. He discovered that many of the cheap wines (Franzia white Grenache) contained up to five times the levels of poisonous arsenic allowed by the EPA for drinking water. It gets better, Hicks found the amount of arsenic in each bottle noticeably rose as its price dropped.

For all you non-chemistry majors, or only took Chem 1100, arsenic is a colorless and highly toxic poison known to cause illness and death when ingested. Some of the long-term health effects of arsenic exposure include various types of cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

After Hicks' findings, he contacted a lawyer in hopes to make this known to the consumers; Hicks' lawyer says that two others have verified his results. So, the question everyone is now asking if this is true is how were they allowed to get away with having this much arsenic in their wine? Well, when it comes to alcohol, wineries aren't forced to label their bottles for arsenic. Hmm, interesting. So not only have we been drinking Franzia cheap box wine at the “Annual Fratalina Wine Mixer" at the local frat, arsenic has been entering our bloodstream and decision-making has been exiting.

Well, will this be the end to the good all days to wine Wednesdays on a budget? Are we going to have to splurge on that $15 bottle of wine that just doesn't compare to saving money or being able to “slap the bag"?

I think we all agree, that being able to save a couple of bucks isn't worth consuming arsenic. Let's hope that this is going to be fixed and hopefully in the future we are able to buy cheap wine without arsenic.