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’. 

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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........

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