Cocaine has a tendency to get Fleet Street all aflutter. So it’s probably no surprise that the Daily Mail had a splash earlier this summer with a feature about a legal energy supplement compared – at least in the headline – to ‘clean cocaine’.
What on earth is this product, I wondered. It turns out that the reality is slightly less dramatic than the tabloids might suggest: Wildkraut – also known as Energy Sniff – is a powdered supplement from Austria which combines the dosage of caffeine you might otherwise get from a Red Bull with some esoteric alpine herbs. The one thing that it does have in common with cocaine is that it is intended to be snorted.
As someone more than partial to energy drinks, I was immediately curious. How much time would I save by swapping my morning can of Monster Ultra for a simple line of white powder? Who knows, it might even save me some money too. These days, it’s all too easy to spend more than £2 on a single energy drink, particularly from smaller supermarkets.
By the time my first dosage – a small thimble-like pot containing five daily portions – had arrived, I was beginning to see some downsides. Surely the notion of having a legal substance that can be snorted is bad news for the hospitality sector, which tends to take the idea of anyone consuming clandestine powders pretty seriously. Wildkraut might be perfectly legal, but it could easily provide camouflage for the hard stuff.
Unsurprisingly, snorting a bump of the caffeine mixture from the back of my hand (as per the serving suggestion) didn’t go down terribly well with the landlord of my new local, the lovely Malt and Mardle in Norwich. Still, he at least has met me enough times to give me the benefit of the doubt when it came to my explanation about it being legal. I wouldn’t want to argue the toss with a Soho doorman.
I was also slightly concerned about the wisdom of sticking anything up your nose. On one hand, I had the residual memory of those nostril-scraping Covid tests that everyone hated. But I also recalled the cautionary tale of Danniella Westbrook, the former EastEnders actress who needed to have her septum reconstructed due to cocaine abuse. Could that ever be a risk?
I was also slightly concerned about the wisdom of sticking anything up your nose
Wildkraut says its products have been dermatologically tested. But ENT specialists aren’t so convinced. ‘The nose is an extremely delicate organ. Its lining – the nasal mucosa – is thin, highly vascular, and designed for one purpose: conditioning air as you breathe,’ says Mark Ferguson, an ENT surgeon and consultant rhinologist. He warns that prolonged usage of snorted products could cause irritation and nosebleeds, or even nasal obstruction.
Despite my reservations, I was surprised by how gentle the whole ‘snorting caffeine’ process actually felt. Not only is the powder completely neutral tasting – though it is available in a stronger menthol flavour for those who prefer their caffeine with a slight kick – but it’s ground extremely finely, meaning that one swift inhalation will get the powder up in your nose.
Did I feel any kind of buzz? To state the obvious, it certainly wasn’t the ‘clean cocaine’ that the excited headlines might suggest. If anything, this would probably have more in common with the kind of knock-off ‘cocaine’ that scammers offload on gullible tourists outside Camden Market – most of which is usually ground-up Pro Plus tablets anyway.
I don’t doubt that Wildkraut has the caffeine effects that it advertises. Though if you’re a daily coffee or Monster consumer you’ll know that one of the things about caffeine dependency is that you tend to notice the absence of the substance more than its presence. Still, the fact that I replaced energy drinks with Wildkraut for three days and didn’t get a withdrawal headache would suggest it does the job.
I was less convinced by the influence of ‘masterwort’, the alpine herb that supposedly adds an extra lift. Those kinds of claims always remind me of the hokey herbal remedies you often see sold at music festivals. Though it isn’t as if energy drinks don’t make similar claims: Holland & Barrett is full of ‘natural’ energy drinks touting the supposedly life-changing powers of green tea extract or concentrated beetroot.
Will Wildkraut be a success? Perhaps so, if they can tap the right market. On that front, I wasn’t surprised to see that the company is explicitly appealing to video gamers, who are very much the white whale of the energy drink industry due to their antisocial hours. The rest of their market segments (‘shift workers, morning grouches, drivers’) read like the target groups for a Reform UK social media campaign.
As for me, I’ll be sticking to my energy drinks for now. There’s just something richly satisfying about that first delicious sip – or even the psychosomatic buzz that comes from opening the can – before a busy morning of drafting and deadlines. Or the refreshing taste of waking up to a perfectly refrigerated Monster Ultra after a heavy evening the night before.
There’s a reason that millions of us worldwide are hooked on those sweet, caffeinated beverages as part of our morning routine. And it’s going to take a lot more than a little dash of white powder to change that.
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