Why 'energy sniff' - a new LEGAL high compared to 'clean cocaine' - is sweeping the party scene... and heading straight to the dinner tables of the middle classes

The video shows a heavy-set man arranging some pale powder into a tiny heap on the back of his hand, before lifting it to one nostril and inhaling with enthusiasm. Now it’s my turn. Lifting up the bottle I ordered online, barely the size of a thimble, I cautiously tap out a similar-sized portion, before lining up the fine powder in the crook of my hand, then - as the man in the ad had shown me - taking a single sniff. I am not, despite every single visual cue, doing anything illegal. I am merely snorting caffeine. This, the Instagram ad informs me, is an ‘energy sniff’, and it is precisely what it sounds like: powdered caffeine, cut with a few ‘alpine herbs and amino acids’, built to be snorted for a hit that enters the bloodstream in a matter of seconds - much more quickly than the leisurely 20 minutes a coffee takes. A faint minty sting hits my nostrils, then clears almost immediately. But 30 seconds later, the promised effect arrives. A small lift behind the eyes, my heart rate goes up a notch, and, as promised, the sensation of perkiness that a caffeinated drink produces, just faster. I have ordered the market leader of ‘energy sniffs’, an Austrian brand called Wildkraut, which arrived in Britain at the end of last year. The company sells a 1g bottle for £24.90, and it comes in Classic and Menthol flavours. You can buy it online, through the brand’s webshop, via a link in one of their social media ads, or on eBay. There’s a box to be ticked to confirm you’re over 18 but nobody checks your ID. The ads themselves are inescapable if you’re part of the target demographic - seemingly men in their 20s and 30s. There are lurid colours and pounding music, with videos of people taking a ‘bump’ mid-gym-set or mid-gig. The whole aesthetic has been borrowed wholesale from a substance nobody involved will actually name. This is obviously faux-cocaine. Austrian brand Wildkraut sells a 1g bottle of powdered caffeine mixed with alpine herbs for £24.90 To make sense of all this, I call Sean Price, the chief operating officer of Wildkraut’s British arm, which is run out of an office in Bridgend, Wales. The backstory, as he tells it, can be traced to Rankweil, a market town on the Austrian-German border, where a plant called masterwort, known as ‘the healing root of the Alps’, has been chewed raw for generations by local farmers, who use it to stave off fatigue. Wildkraut’s founder, Eugen Foltera, wanted a product that generated the same buzz without the chewing. ‘Coffee’s great,’ Price says, ‘but not everyone wants to drink six, seven cups a day.’ Energy drinks don’t cut it either because they contain ‘like two and a half times your daily dosage of sugar’. So Foltera ‘spent a few years working with various people’ to design a powder for what Price keeps calling ‘the nasal mucosa’ (the lining within the nose that absorbs drugs rapidly). A few years - and one appearance on the Austrian version of Dragons' Den - later and here we are. Wildkraut now trades in ten countries, with Germany its biggest market. ‘They’re slightly different from us culturally on the continent,’ Price says. ‘A lot more experimental and forgiving.’ ‘Surely you see the associations,’ I protest. Wildkraut appeared on an Austrian version of Dragons' Den and now trades in ten countries, with Germany its biggest market He sighs audibly, the sigh of a man who has had this topic raised in conversation many times before and knows it will keep cropping up. He argues that while we Brits assume illicit activities at the first sight of white powder, Europeans - who have been genteelly taking snuff (finely ground tobacco) for centuries - have a much more sophisticated attitude to it. Yet it is undeniable that Wildkraut is trading off cocaine’s notoriety. Snorting is their ‘unique selling point’, the trick that converts this herbal pick-me-up into a talking point, and it works precisely because it makes the nation flinch. Price reels off a roll-call of those in need of a caffeine hit: lorry drivers, shift workers, students cramming through the night and bodybuilders. Gamers are another ‘massive’ constituency, he says. Online streamers looking for a clean caffeine hit without the sugar and additives of an energy drink loaded with E-numbers also love Wildkraut, apparently. The party crowd, he insists, is a ‘secondary’ market, despite the fact he sells ten-bottle offers known as ‘Festival Packs’. Price takes it himself, he confides, only when shattered before a long shift. ‘It’s more of an emergency caffeine hit than a daily substitute,’ he tells me. I put it to him straight: is this not normalising, even glamorising cocaine and other illegal drugs by mirroring the look of putting something up your nose - in much the same way candy cigarettes allowed kids to mimick smoking before they were banned? ‘It really depends,’ he replies, ‘where your mentality is on this type of thing.’ People are quick to judge, he goes on, ‘but, for me, it can be a totally normalised method of caffeine delivery'. The idea for Wildkraut came from the plant masterwort, known as ‘the healing root of the Alps’, which has been chewed raw for generations by local farmers who use it to stave off fatigue For the clinical view, I call Harry Sumnall, professor of substance use at Liverpool John Moores University, who has spent two decades studying how young people behave around drugs. He doesn’t see it as much of a worry. Energy sniffs are not likely to glamorise drugs, in his view, rather they reveal how far the normalisation of drug use has already travelled, and Wildkraut, he suggests, is absolutely marketing with that normalisation in mind. Nobody is shocked by an instant-absorption caffeine mouth tab, the sort of thing Listerine used to sell, because nobody would suspect a mouth strip of pushing people towards acid. But Wildkraut is using cocaine’s notoriety to gain traction it otherwise couldn’t buy. That said, in comparison with its more explicit American cousins, its approach is positively coy. Across the pond, brands called Sniffy and Wanna Bump, one of which ships the product with a fake rolled-up banknote, borrow the whole choreography of cocaine. Even if we accept that Wildkraut isn’t a gateway drug, we should take it seriously given that, if taken to excess it can disrupt sleep, attention and mood. Caffeine isn’t thought of as a ‘drug,’ Sumnall says, ‘but it certainly is one'. Just last week the Government announced that children under 16 will be banned from buying high-caffeine energy drinks in England. But energy powders exist in a regulatory grey area. They aren’t a food, they aren’t a medicine and they aren’t a supplement. Nobody is examining the caffeine dose the way they would in those categories, and a product could in theory carry an eye-watering amount without anyone officially looking into it. Then there are the risks associated with snorting powder of any sort. We all remember Daniella Westbrook, the EastEnders actress whose septum collapsed due to her cocaine addiction. And the truth is that stuffing powder up your nose, no matter what’s in it, is not without its consequences. A 2024 medical paper in The Lancet looking at ‘snortable energy powder’ said that repeated ‘insufflation’ of more or less anything can damage the nasal mucosa over time. This year, the same scientists experimented on human nasal-lining cells in a lab. After dosing them with snortable powder, they concluded that the resulting damage was caused by the caffeine itself, and flagged up the ‘largely unknown nasal toxicity’ of a product a growing number of people now sniff daily. Wildkraut’s answer to this is that a dish of cells is not a living nose and points to a dermatological test that rated it ‘excellent’. However, nobody, as Price concedes, has studied it over the long term. So where does that leave energy sniffs? While it may well become something normalised among shift workers reaching for a quick hit at 3am or students occasionally using some before an exam, it is unlikely that it will push a younger generation into experimenting with cocaine. What’s perhaps more interesting is that it reflects the normalisation of our drug culture in the first place. The powder, in the end, says less about the kids than the rest of us: a country so fluent in the choreography of cocaine that we can now sell it back to ourselves with the drug taken out. Snort responsibly. Or, better still, have a coffee like a grown-up.