FDA To Review Inhalable Caffeine

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FDA To Review Inhalable Caffeine

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 22, 2012 @07:25AM from the jittery-breathing dept.

First time accepted submitter RenderSeven writes "Manufacturing.net reports that U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials plan to investigate whether inhalable caffeine sold in lipstick-sized canisters is safe for consumers and if its manufacturer was right to brand it as a dietary supplement. AeroShot went on the market late last month in Massachusetts and New York, and it's also available in France. Consumers put one end of the canister in their mouths and breathe in, releasing a fine powder that dissolves almost instantly."

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Great by Soporific · 2012-02-22 07:27 · Score: 3, Insightful

Instant jitters and an easy way to dose higher than you'd expect.
~S
1. Re:Great by retchdog · 2012-02-22 07:36 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  not to mention it's incredibly expensive. i computed it once, iirc it's about 100x as expensive as no-name caffeine pills, and 200x more expensive than bulk anhydrous powder. about its only upside would be that it's maybe harder to overdose, if the effects are actually immediate (which i'm not sure about).
  i can only imagine that this is due to some drug war-stigma against pills. maybe it's for women; studies have shown that women prefer to insufflate their drugs.
  
  --
  "They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
2. Re:Great by Matheus · 2012-02-22 07:40 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  WCPGW
  I used to have a chemlab-grade bottle of pure caffeine. It had no less than 8 different warning labels on it telling you how it could (and most likely would) kill you. Most people don't understand how small a 'real' amount of Caffeine they are consuming. In amounts the equivalent of say, snorting a line of cocaine, you would cause *serious damage. What's to keep your average marker-sniffing high school student from cracking these open and going to town (and then to the hospital)?
3. Re:Great by Russ1642 · 2012-02-22 07:45 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  All chemicals destined for the lab have insane warning labels. Buy some cleaned sand from a chemical supply company (used for filtration). It's off a beach somewhere but you'd think it was a bottle of plague-infested death shards. They just slap the same FUD warning label on everything just because it's going in a lab. You never know when something is contaminated by the reagent next to it on the shelf but it's still pretty over-the-top.
4. Re:Great by vlm · 2012-02-22 07:45 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  What's to keep your average marker-sniffing high school student from cracking these open and going to town (and then to the hospital)?
  A fatal dose would cost about "three hundred" or so dollars and ripping all the canisters apart would take hours, I suppose. And probably more mechanical skill that your average stimulant addict.
  Probably a "easier" way to poison someone, since foul play is expected if they find your blood full of rat poison, but if there's so much caffeine in your blood that its crystallized (slight exaggeration) then they'll just shrug their shoulders and say "I saw this on Oprah; kids these days; too bad"
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
5. Re:Great by retchdog · 2012-02-22 07:48 · Score: 2
  
  or they could crush caffeine pills, which is even easier and hasn't been a problem.
  
  --
  "They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
6. Re:Great by viperidaenz · 2012-02-22 08:25 · Score: 2
  
  Yes, I highly recommend setting safe levels of substances to the LD50. Because a Lethal Dose for 50% of the population is safe.
  
  It would be amusing for kids to think taking lots of these Aeroshots is cool, and after taking a bunch of them get the shits from the overdose of B vitamins
7. Re:Great by frosty_tsm · 2012-02-22 10:12 · Score: 2
  
  i can only imagine that this is due to some drug war-stigma against pills.
  Because inhaling something has never been mixed with the drug war.
8. Re:Great by QRDeNameland · 2012-02-22 11:06 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  In amounts [of caffeine] the equivalent of say, snorting a line of cocaine, you would cause *serious damage.
  Citation please.
  In my misspent youth circa the early 80s, there were commonly available "fake speed" caffeine pills circulating...made to look like real 'pink hearts' or 'black beauties'..which were sold legally and prominently advertised in High Times. And kids would bust them open and snort them, something I tried exactly once. It burned like hell, but nobody died, went to the hospital, or even got particularly high from them.
  And just to look at numbers...the typical cup of coffee has 100mg of caffeine, a can of Jolt has 280mg. So 4 cans of Jolt is more damaging than ingesting a entire gram of pure cocaine? I don't see it.
  Not that I'm saying approving this is a good idea, even as someone pretty heartily opposed to drug prohibition in all its forms. But I don't think the proposition that pure caffeine is more dangerous than cocaine stands up to the facts.
  
  --
  Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
9. Re:Great by TubeSteak · 2012-02-22 14:13 · Score: 2
  
  All chemicals destined for the lab have insane warning labels.
  Yea, but lab grade caffeine powder really is dangerous.
  The recommended dose is something like 1/16th of a teaspoon.
  A teaspoonfull is around 4 grams. That will put most of us in the hospital and will kill some light weights.
  A tablespoon of pure caffeine powder is significantly on the wrong side of the LD50 for most of us.
  You're better off not having pure caffeine powder in your home.
  
  --
  [Fuck Beta]
  o0t!
10. Re:Great by Anarchduke · 2012-02-22 14:14 · Score: 2
  
  do they make that in a non-fat variety?
  
  --
  who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
11. Re:Great by sFurbo · 2012-02-23 00:37 · Score: 2
  
  Caffeine is bitter and has an LD50 is around 200 mg/kg body weight in rats. For table salt, the LD50 for humans is around 1g/kg of body weight. Caffein is about 5 times more toxic then something normally considered utterly nontoxic(acutely, anyway), and it tastes really bad. You will not accidentally eat a lethal dose of caffeine. On the other hand, it is quite easy to take enough to make you utterly miserable for days, and unable to sleep it off.
Snorting coffee? by Barbara,+not+Barbie · 2012-02-22 07:28 · Score: 5, Funny

Next thing you know, they'll be snorting coke!

--
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
1. Re:Snorting coffee? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-22 07:35 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Been there, done that. The problem is that it keeps running back out of my nose and the fizzies make me sneeze.
2. Re:Snorting coffee? by vlm · 2012-02-22 07:46 · Score: 2
  
  Next thing you know, they'll be snorting coke!
  I'm sure they'll be banned for that reason. Cops/security guard/schoolteachers can't tell at a glance what has been reloaded into the canisters.
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
3. Re:Snorting coffee? by jamstar7 · 2012-02-22 10:05 · Score: 2
  
  Last time I tried, I damned near drowned.
  
  It was that 'New Coke'. Didn't have a tenth the flavor or kick of the Classic.
  
  --
  Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Tony Montana.... by dgrover13 · 2012-02-22 07:28 · Score: 2

If only Tony Montana could have found a legal subsitute for his miami business... -"Have you guys seen my straw?"
FDA review means little by girlintraining · 2012-02-22 07:35 · Score: 4, Interesting

The FDA is a gimp government department. The only thing it can review in depth is approval for new drugs, and that's only because the corporations submitting the drugs have to pay for that. Funding for everything else, from food and cosmetics inspection to even chasing down advertisers that use the phrase 'FDA approved' illegally, is so hamstrung as to be useless. The only time the FDA gets involved is when there's press coverage on people getting sick and/or dying. Only a very, very small fraction of meat is ever inspected... and there are holes in the system so big you could fly a 737 through it and still have ample room to fit at least a dozen Rush Limbaughs lengthwise through them. Take honey, for example: Honey is mixed and remixed with many other suppliers, such that the expiration date is never known. Should a particular batch of honey be close to expiring or would otherwise fail inspection, it is shipped across the border, mixed in with good honey, and then imported back. This is legal. There's so many examples of this it's not even funny.
Bottom line here: Don't trust the FDA when it comes to food safety. It may be their responsibility to ensure food is safe, but they're so horribly underfunded and compromised by corporate interests that they cannot realistically be expected to succeed.

--
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
1. Re:FDA review means little by causality · 2012-02-22 07:42 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  The FDA is a gimp government department. The only thing it can review in depth is approval for new drugs, and that's only because the corporations submitting the drugs have to pay for that. Funding for everything else, from food and cosmetics inspection to even chasing down advertisers that use the phrase 'FDA approved' illegally, is so hamstrung as to be useless. The only time the FDA gets involved is when there's press coverage on people getting sick and/or dying. Only a very, very small fraction of meat is ever inspected... and there are holes in the system so big you could fly a 737 through it and still have ample room to fit at least a dozen Rush Limbaughs lengthwise through them. Take honey, for example: Honey is mixed and remixed with many other suppliers, such that the expiration date is never known. Should a particular batch of honey be close to expiring or would otherwise fail inspection, it is shipped across the border, mixed in with good honey, and then imported back. This is legal. There's so many examples of this it's not even funny.
  Bottom line here: Don't trust the FDA when it comes to food safety. It may be their responsibility to ensure food is safe, but they're so horribly underfunded and compromised by corporate interests that they cannot realistically be expected to succeed.
  Are you aware that ancient Egyptian tombs have been unsealed and were found to contain honey thousands of years old that was still edible? It's an excellent preservative.
  
  I'm no fan of the FDA either but this isn't your strongest example.
  
  --
  It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
2. Re:FDA review means little by girlintraining · 2012-02-22 07:50 · Score: 2
  
  Are you aware that ancient Egyptian tombs have been unsealed and were found to contain honey thousands of years old that was still edible? It's an excellent preservative.
  
  I'm aware that this fact is repeated often on the internet but nobody's ever been able to provide a citation that doesn't cite another, that cites another, that leads on in a circle forever. Regardless, such practices are unregulated and there is no tracking or auditing, so if something that wasn't honey made it into production, or if it contained botulism (yes, honey can indeed become infected with pathogens, le gasp)... there would be no way to trace it back to its source. That was my point. If the Egyptians happened to be really good at preserving things, you know, like people and honey, well all the more power to them. However, this is not Egypt during the time of the Parohs.
  
  --
  #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
3. Re:FDA review means little by causality · 2012-02-22 08:04 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Are you aware that ancient Egyptian tombs have been unsealed and were found to contain honey thousands of years old that was still edible? It's an excellent preservative.
  I'm aware that this fact is repeated often on the internet but nobody's ever been able to provide a citation that doesn't cite another, that cites another, that leads on in a circle forever. Regardless, such practices are unregulated and there is no tracking or auditing, so if something that wasn't honey made it into production, or if it contained botulism (yes, honey can indeed become infected with pathogens, le gasp)... there would be no way to trace it back to its source. That was my point. If the Egyptians happened to be really good at preserving things, you know, like people and honey, well all the more power to them. However, this is not Egypt during the time of the Parohs.
  The statements of the obvious ("this isn't ancient Egypt" etc.) reveal a slight impatient hostility on your part. It's not my fault you chose a weak example.
  
  The principle here is that honey has such a high concentration of varous sugars and such a low concentration of water relative to those, that it provides an environment quite hostile for microbes. Osmosis across their cell membranes would tend to dehydrate them. It's similar to what happens when food (or whatever) is packed in salt. For this reason honey was once used to dress wounds in order to help prevent infection.
  
  Knowing something about its nature is an alternative to dealing with any circular citations you might encounter. At least if your sole concern is whether you are likely to be harmed by eating "expired" honey. I for one am not worried about this at all, but as I am not a doctor, nutritionist, or other such practitioner I'm not telling anyone else what they should do. I simply consider it more than coincidence that such a widespread practice of selling expired honey (assuming I accept that at face value) hasn't resulted in reported cases of food poisoning like we saw with tainted spinach, cantaloupe, et al in recent years.
  
  --
  It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
4. Re:FDA review means little by elfprince13 · 2012-02-22 08:22 · Score: 2
  
  Parent doesn't know wth they're talking about. In this case, the honey is the preservative. Back in the day, honey-glazed hams weren't just honey-glazed because it tasted good, they were honey glazed because it was a way to preserve the ham. As one of the other responders to this post mentioned, high concentrations of sugar make for a really hostile environment for bacteria.
5. Re:FDA review means little by Fned · 2012-02-22 09:47 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Citation needed.
  Every civilization that has had access to bees since before there was writing?
6. Re:FDA review means little by LordLimecat · 2012-02-22 11:28 · Score: 2
  
  http://frugalliving.about.com/od/foodsavings/f/Honey.htm
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Preservation
  http://www.stilltasty.com/questions/index/128
  http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/04/15/why-doesn%E2%80%99t-honey-go-bad/
  Any other questions?
not inhaled by greghodg · 2012-02-22 07:37 · Score: 4, Informative

It's not "inhaled." You puff the powder into your mouth, it dissolves in the saliva in your mouth, then you essentially swallow the saliva+caffeine and it's absorbed in your digestive system. No better or faster than any other caffeine that you swallow, and I guarantee a bottle of Vivarin is going to cost a HELL of a lot less than this gimmick.
1. Re:not inhaled by IcyHando'Death · 2012-02-22 08:15 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Yeah, well that's what their marketing stuff says, but that's just their end-run around the FDA. When used as directed: i.e. puffed into the mouth and swallowed, it can pass as a dietary supplement. But it's pretty clear that the fastest hit will come from inhaling and everybody knows it. The French manufacturer is named "Breathable Foods" for god's sake. Pretty transparent
.NET by zigurat667 · 2012-02-22 07:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

had to read that three times until I realized that this Manufacturing.net is a website and has nothing to do with .NET reporting
How dare they!!! by jellomizer · 2012-02-22 07:43 · Score: 3, Funny

The FDA checking the safety of a Food/Drug for general public consumption.
Just because it is legal elsewhere it doesn't mean it is safe for public consumption.
When the FDA lets a dangerous food and drug go free, they will get people yelling at them for not doing their job.
If the FDA bans a food or drug that isn't as dangerous, it is the strong arm of the mighty big brother keeping us poor folk who use this stuff as a cheap replacement for a 50' Boat, and 3 Vacation homes, from having any joy in our lives at all.

--
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Re:We're all going to be thinner by vlm · 2012-02-22 07:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

Caffeine pills. nodoz and friends. I used them to wean myself off caffeinated energy drinks without a headache. Its been awhile but I used a spreadsheet and I distinctly remember how much of a PITA it was to chop nodoz smaller than 1/4 size so I went for 1/2 pill intervals. I recall the process took a couple days.
Psychological addiction was unaffected of course. Sit at computer, sip energy drink, right?

--
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Re:Caffeine Coccaine by LoP_XTC · 2012-02-22 07:54 · Score: 2

Isn't pure caffeine powder deadly? I'm guessing this product doesn't actually contain "caffeine" powder or we'll hear about how some kid killed him/herself with a pack of these canisters.
Even worse ... its odorless, tasteless, and dissolves instantly in water. Thankfully most of us from the 80's generation have built up an immunity to it.
-LoPXTC

--
"Curiouser and Curiouser...." -Alice
why so small in scope? by roc97007 · 2012-02-22 07:59 · Score: 3, Funny

It seems the natural outcome of this would be giant fire-extinguisher sized containers in each corner of the building regularly spritzing caffeine into the air to generally improve employee output. You could even hide the canister behind ceiling tiles. Just another service provided by your company.

--
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
1. Re:why so small in scope? by Rhacman · 2012-02-22 09:09 · Score: 2
  
  But why hide it? It was listed in the benefits package.
  
  --
  Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Re:Caffeine Coccaine by Pope · 2012-02-22 08:11 · Score: 4, Funny

Sounds more like Iocane powder!

--
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Re:Inhaling powder? by greghodg · 2012-02-22 08:45 · Score: 2

You're right, although it's left pretty ambiguous, it is definitely NOT inhaled. It's a fine powder that dissolves in the mouth, absorbed through digestive system. Just like every other orally consumed caffeine. Also, it costs roughly 100 times more than the exact same thing in a pill ($3/100mg aeroshot vs. 200 count 100mg caffeine pills for ~$6).
Re:Snorting alcohol by jones_supa · 2012-02-22 09:51 · Score: 2

Confirmed also by MythBusters that vodka will remove bad odor from your feet. :)
Re:We're all going to be thinner by Jah-Wren+Ryel · 2012-02-22 10:14 · Score: 2

Psychological addiction was unaffected of course. Sit at computer, sip energy drink, right?
FWIW I've been working on a serious diet-soda addiction. As in diet soda was my primary source of fluids every day of the week.
I bought a "Primo Flavorstation" from Loews - it lets you carbonate tap water. They want you to buy syrups as a make-your-own-soda thing. But I've found that simply carbonated water does it for me about 90% of the time (and all of the syrups I've tried taste like shit).
There is another brand out there - Sodastream. But sodastream sucks because they booby-trap their co2 tanks to force you to buy refils from them at ~$25 a tank (and their new units have half-size tanks too). The Primo takes standard paintball tanks, so you can refill the cansister for about $3 at almost any sports store (I use the sports authority that is just down the block from me). Primo also wants to sell you $25 refills, but they don't try to force you - only give you BS about "food grade" co2, which is no different from any other kind of non-medical co2.

--
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I tried one of these by brando56894 · 2012-02-22 12:43 · Score: 2

I got a free sample of one of these in the mail, they're from the company that makes Le Whiff "breathable chocolate". They work, but it's a horribly planned product. The experience is equivalent to inhaling pixie stix but it tastes a lot worse. You put the product in your mouth and instead of the logical idea of putting the hole that the power comes out of directly on top of the product (facing the back of your throat) so when you inhale it goes directly down your throat, the holes are on the sides facing the roof of your mouth and your tongue; so when you inhale your tongue and the roof of your mouth get coated in this nasty powder (mine was lime flavored) and the taste lingers for about a good 10-15 minutes.You have to insert the product far in your mouth (about 90% of it in your mouth) to avoid the nasty coating and for it to properly go down your throat. The product only contains about 3-5 doses, so overdoses are highly unlikely. I doubt these things contain more than 50mg of caffeine per dose, so even if you emptied the whole container and snorted it, it'd be equivalent to a large energy drink or a strong cup of coffee. I tried to crack one open and it isn't an easy task, they're made out of very tough plastic.