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Comment by awakeasleep | Hacker News Reader

Just in case anyone is interested in caffeine powder (interesting because it sublimates) do yourself a favor and don't order it.

The smallest orders available online are enough to kill an elephant, and you need a $500+ scale to dose it accurately enough to keep a human from overdosing. And while most human overdoses will be uniquely unpleasant but not lethal, there is definitely the potential for a lethal dose if someone puts a tablespoonful into a drink or something.

Pure caffeine is a uniquely bad thing to have around your living quarters. It's basically a poison (because of the difficulty in measuring dosage and small range between useful and dangerous effect), but people feel very comfortable with it, imagine it's safe to eat, and a big enough chunk of people will act macho towards it.

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Funny story, I use to work for a pharma company, and we had all that kind of stuff in a secure drug lock up area. You had to log stuff out, it was all very organized. We did a lot of contract manufacturing and we'd get large orders and bring in temp workers. We had a guy one day who ended up getting into the pure caffeine powder, the chemist in the lab figured he'd ingested 800 cola's worth of caffeine. Like you said, not going to kill you but we sent him to the hospital any ways. And we decided to only allow regular employees to get into that area :)

800 colas of caffeine is easily enough to kill you. 34mg caffeine/12oz Coca Cola * 800 cans = 27g. LD50 in humans is 150-200mg/kg, so 12-16g for a 80kg adult.

You seem like you are knowledgeable about these things... how do they measure the LD50 in humans?

We kill mice, rats, hamsters, rabbits, and dogs with caffeine, and extrapolate the LD50 from our test data. Animal testing can be really awful.

The alternative is not knowing the LD50 of caffeine for humans.

Doesn't seem that crazy to me. One site I looked at sells 300 capsules for $15 and the whole page is littered with clear warnings about overdose. The lethal dose of caffeine seems to be around 5 to 10 grams so you'd have to eat 25 200mg capsules in a short period to get into danger. That doesn't seem any more dangerous than something like tylenol which they do sell.

I think the grandparents warning only applies to pure caffein powder. Essentially pills are (professionally) predosed to be safe, so it shouldn't be a problem.

The danger is with powders, not pills. Dosing powders requires you have a scale that is more accurate than what most people have, and proper technique in weighing it. The best way for most people to get an accurate dosage is to compound the caffeine with some filler and weigh that (cut it, basically).

Honestly, the only reason you should be dealing with powders is if you're making your own 'stack' of nootropics.

It's not that hard to dose out. Mix 10 grams of caffeine into 1L of water to obtain a 1% solution. Mix 100 grams of your primary solution into 1L of water to obtain a 0.1% secondary solution.

Every gram of secondary solution now has a milligram of caffeine. 2 tablespoons of secondary solution is roughly equivalent to a cola.

You're not even remotely correct. A $20 one will work just fine. Caffeine is dosed in the 100+ mg range to 300 mg for the average person.

> you need a $500+ scale to dose it accurately enough to keep a human from overdosing.

No you don't. It's not hard at all using milligram scales < $50. I do it all the time with various substances... including caffeine.

Yet they readily sell 5g bags of Yohimbine HCl powder which can cause cardiac problems at 30-50mg.

I agree that caffeine powder isn't worth buying because it tends to come in large sizes and is hard to measure out. I'd recommend caffeine pills/tablets, though. Much easier than brewing some coffee or tea, and you can manage dosages more easily.

The best way to use bulk caffeine is to dissolve it in water. It's highly soluble and you can easily measure larger volumes of water.

> you need a $500+ scale to dose it accurately enough

Or you can just get a super small 0.25 cent plastic scoop that amounts to normal dose.

You definitely can't do this, because you don't actually know the density of what you're measuring. Depending on how the caffeine was prepared, it'll be in crystalline flakes or chunks of varying sizes and configurations. Think of it like snow. You can't tell how much water went into a given volume of snow because you don't know if you're dealing with fluffy snow, wet snow, super fine powder snow, etc.

You definitely can. You don't need exactly 200.000 mg of caffeine for it to be 1 serving. Using 2 ~100mg spoonfuls will probably get you 150-250mg of caffeine, which isn't any more or less accurate than brewed coffee, which varies wildly in caffeine content.

Interesting how they are not responding to comments like this demonstrating how wrong they are.

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