FDA To Review Inhalable Caffeine

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."

Comments

Snorting coffee?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

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

Re:Snorting coffee?

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there, done that. The problem is that it keeps running back out of my nose and the fizzies make me sneeze.

FDA review means little

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:FDA review means little

[causality]

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.

Re:FDA review means little

[causality]

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.

Re:FDA review means little

[Fned]

Citation needed.

Every civilization that has had access to bees since before there was writing?

not inhaled

[greghodg]

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.

Re:not inhaled

[IcyHando'Death]

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

Re:Great

[Matheus]

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)?

Re:Great

[Russ1642]

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.

Re:Great

[vlm]

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"

Re:We're all going to be thinner

[vlm]

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?

Re:Caffeine Coccaine

[Pope]

Sounds more like Iocane powder!

Re:Great

[QRDeNameland]

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.