An extremely Bad Idea. I implore you to do none of the following things:
It came to pass one day that a friend of mine, of the more intelligent but misguided type -- you know the kind, the ones that would be super villains if we lived in Metropolis? -- and I decided it might be cool to make this substance under the following rationale:
A) We were college students who ingested several tons of the stuff on a daily basis.
B) Drinking coffee had become too time consuming long ago and taking pills was getting to be an arduous process.
C) Pills take time to digest and hit the system. Nasal spray, as any good coke fiend knows, goes straight through the mucous membranes in the sinuses and to the brain in short order (this will come up again later as to why caffeinated nasal spray is a bad idea).
We made the first batch from No-Doz stock: Using his mortar and pestle (i told you he was an evil supergenius, only they have mortar and pestle sets in their college dorms) we ground up ten or so pills.
Next we used vodka to cut the caffeine from the other gack in a pill: mixing the ground up powder with vodka and stirring, the caffeine dissolved into the vodka and the rest precipitated out, allowing us to strain this depressing stimulant into a common everyday nasal spray bottle, available free with the purchase of various nasal spray compounds at your local drug store.
The product was now ready for test. We got a third party to test the stuff. After he didn't die, we both tried it. Not bad, although the alcohol burned the sinuses. Bad.
Cut to the day the mail order caffeine that Lex had procured arrived from the distribution company. 500 grams of caffeine. Pure caffeine. To give an idea of scale, that is enough to make at least twenty-five hundred cups of coffee. Strong coffee.
This becomes a far simpler process because we do not have to extract the pure caffeine. Simply dissolve the caffeine in water -- eliminate the nasty burn. Simple. Except, knowing something of biology i tell Magneto to add salt so as not to lyse the cells within the nasal passages (the reason your nose hurts like hell when you breathe in water). He adds too much. This stuff burns worse than the first batch.
Batch Three, however, was perfect. It felt like a cool breeze going in and had a kick like a mule. Unfortunately, there is a problem with using pure caffeine. It hits the system immediately. All of it. Instant up -- instant down. We decided to swear off of it at this point, after I took the stuff one afternoon and developed temporary narcolepsy.
I still have the container lying around somewhere after Herr Starr decided he wanted no more to do with it.
This is a Bad thing. People think you're a drug freak instead of just a person with too much time, too little impulse control and a love of making things. Ah well, what's college for if not to provide a place where you can fuck up in an environment isolated from the real world?
This has been a public service announcement.