(poignant music)

Hey guys, I'm Brent Rose, tech writer

and pouchless marsupial.

Now, you may have been hearing about powdered alcohol.

It was just recently approved for sale in the U.S.

Despite that, a lot of states have already gone ahead

and banned it outright.

Why? Because people are afraid their upstanding children

will be sneaking this highly concentrated booze powder

into Sunday School, spiking each others' juice boxes

and snorting lines of it off each others' genitals.

Which, would be terrible, if it weren't

almost certainly completely impossible.

So today we're gonna be whipping up a batch of our own.

We're gonna see if we can get drunk on it,

we're gonna see if these concerns have any basis in reality,

and we're gonna see really if you should be

giving a shit at all about powdered alcohol.

So we don't know exactly how the commercial version

of this stuff is gonna be made.

The best working theory came from our friends

over at Pop Sci, who posited that it would be

a neutral grain spirit and a tapioca maltodextrin.

Now the stuff is really interesting,

it's been used in molecular gastronomy

because it's really, really powdery, super-absorbent.

Let's whip up a batch.

(upbeat music)

So if you remember we used 30 grams,

which is just over an ounce of 151 proof spirit,

which is about two drinks worth.

Thank you.

So here we have our two drinks.

Basically you're getting a 10% ABV drink,

so like a really weak wine, or a really strong beer.

Let's chug these and see if we can get a buzz.

(high pitched chugging music)

(gasps)

It was like drinking bread water.

Ah, let's make some more.

Well a spoonful of sugar and red dye

makes the medicine go down.

Oh God,

(discordant music)

My body's never gonna forgive me for this.

So we noticed there was a lot of stuff

accumulating on the sides, which makes us think

that I should probably drink it.

Screw it.

(discordant music)

Oh, oh it's so toxic, just keeps getting worse.

Was a vulcanized flavor.

(blender whirs)

So it's been about 20 minutes since my last drink.

I feel disgusting, I've got a light buzz going on,

but my stomach just feels like it's full of glue.

Let's move on to the two things

that people are really, really concerned about.

Spiking and snorting.

So, spiking a drink. For this we're gonna try to use

the exact same volume that the commercial version will have.

Let's put it in a baggy, we'll see how easy it is

to spike a drink.

Am I slurring my words?

[Cameraman] Maybe.

So this is 29 grams, or what will be one drink's worth

of powdered alcohol in the consumer ver,

in the consumer version.

It comes out (cameraman laughs)

Shit, I'm getting drunk.

So we've got two cola beverages here,

they're dark they should mask color changes,

there's no ice in them.

Add it in, let's stir, somebody's stepped away from the bar

or is looking the other direction,

and some evildoer is trying to put

about an ounce of alcohol into their drink.

Which, let's be realistic here,

that's already pretty stupid.

You're not worried about somebody spiking your drink

with alcohol, you're worried about somebody putting

rufies in your drink,

which dissolve pretty much instantly and are tiny.

So I've been stirring for about a minute now.

You can see there's still pretty big chunks in there.

Okay, it's now been five minutes, my wrist is killing me.

Even if the commercial version dissolves twice as fast,

there's just no way that anybody would go through

this much trouble to spike a drink with an ounce of alcohol.

By comparison, here's an ounce of alcohol.

Spiked, why wouldn't you just use the liquid version,

there's no conceivable reason to use powder

for this nefarious purpose.

That's that, I'm still gonna drink it.

(high pitched chugging music)

(gasps)

(discordant music)

(dramatic music)

So snorting.

The number one concern that people raise

is that kids are gonna snort this stuff

and get instantaneously super drunk.

I'm here to tell you now,

there's absolutely no way that's possible.

Here's why.

This is one drink.

You would have to snort all of this

to get the alcohol of one single drink.

So I'm by no means an expert on this sort of thing,

but my understanding is that a typical line

is about a tenth of a gram.

Each of these lines here is about half a gram,

so these are gigantic lines.

You would have to do these 30 lines

to get half a shot of alcohol.

I can't believe I'm about to do this.

For the sake of science,

this is like one tenth of a line here.

Fuck me.

(sniffs loudly)

Okay, yep it instantly burns behind my eyeball,

so I can already feel that side of my nose closing up.

It's burning all the way over on to the other side

of my nostril now.

[Cameraman] Are you okay?

Yeah, I'm okay.

Oh God. So that little bit that I did sucked.

I would have to do 600 times that amount

to get one shot of alcohol in me,

when I could just take the shot.

Even if somehow a person were able to get a full line

into each nostril, your nose would just close up

after that, there's just no possible way

that kids are gonna do this.

There's no way!

I'm sneezing like crazy.

(sniffs) Ah, God.

So, what if anything, did we learn here today?

I had about four drinks made with powdered alcohol.

It got me a little bit buzzed,

we learned that spiking somebody's drink with it

is totally impractical,

and we certainly realized that snorting it

is ill-advised, stupid and completely inefficient.

All that being said, can you imagine a use case

where this would actually be useful thing?

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Subscribe to Wired if you haven't already

for more videos like this,

and, with all that being said,

we've only got one thing left to do.

(loud discordant music)

(blows hard)

(laughs)

[Cameraman] Come here, come here.

So, what was the plan there?

Yeah, we were going for a big elaborate flame ball,

and it didn't quite hit.

(loud discordant music)