Snorting Splenda — don’t try this at home kids!

Anyone up for a little “skiing” on the kiddie hill?

Kids do the damnedest things.

Yesterday, while I was in one of my favourite South Granville Restaurants (which would prefer to go unnamed), I noticed a grubby, chubby kid in a hoody and shorts standing outside with his back to the main entrance. It so happened that while I was looking at him he emptied the white powdered contents of two yellow packets into the palm of one of his hands; the hand and his face met halfway and he appeared to energetically snort up whatever powder he was holding.

The lad stood still for a bit before turning and coming into the restaurant. He brushed by a woman on his way to the counter where he ordered food.

I like a little gateway drug in my coffee

It developed that the bumped-into woman had witnessed the druggie move outside and was actually too terrified to stay in the same restaurant with the kid, who, by this time, was stolidly eating at a table in a back corner.

The woman left. Then shortly afterwards the kid left. He looked and walked like he was sedated.

After a few unsuccessfully tries at coaxing a cigarette out of the passing crowd he joined the flow and vanished.

I went outside and looked at the ripped-up remains of the yellow packets he dropped on the sidewalk.

Nothing but empty packets of Splenda-branded sucralose, an artificial sweetener.

That made no sense to me at all. Who snorts Splenda?

You’re kidding me, right?

Well dip me in corn syrup and call me sweetie! Turns out massively ingesting or snorting artificial sweetners — Splenda or Crystal Light for sucralose, Sweet ‘N Low for saccharine and NutraSweet or Equal for aspartame — has been a “thing” for at least five years.

There’s nothing psychoactive about it beyond the possible sugar high.

Saccharin, the centenarian of artificial sweeteners, can be 200 to 700 times sweeter than sugar. Sucralose, which is sucrose on steroids, can be 600 times sweeter than sugar. And aspartame is at most 200 times sweeter.

According to the Sugar Association, the newest artificial sweetener, neotame, is approximately 8,000 times sweeter than sugar but not yet available as a food ingredient you can snort.

Internet references to snorting Splenda go back to about 2009. Only a few take it seriously.

A Dr. Janet Hull, who warns against the dangers of aspartame in general, writes of kids snorting the sweetener for the promise of a free hyperactive thrill.

But generally the Internet uses “snorting Splenda” as a code, like “hillbilly”, for being immature, reckless and/or stupid — childish if you will.

Thanks to the Internet, it will be “thing” for children to try forever; right up there with the “cinnamon challenge”.

But hopefully not that many kids because most artificial sweeteners are anything but kids stuff.

Aspartame is absolutely unavoidable in the Western diet. It’s one of the most studied, most used and most controversial food additives ever. The consensus is that it is “safe for human consumption at current levels of exposure”.

Sucralose, to put it crudely, is sucrose doped with chlorine. A selling point of sucralose has been the fact that the body can hardly absorb it. However, some is absorbed and thus chlorine, which is a very dangerous and reactive chemical. Regulators certainly never imagined a child eating it by the spoonful or snorting it right into their bloodstream.

And after all that, no one on the Internet will even say categorically whether snorting Splenda actually gives you a giant sugar rush. However, many sources do agree about the nosebleed. Click the image to enlarge it.