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Food

Who Wants to Do Chocolate Key Bumps?

Love putting stuff up your nose? Also love fine Belgian chocolates? Well, we have got news for you, gourmand. All of your interests can be found in one fun powder—and it’s a legal high.

Love putting stuff up your nose? Also love fine Belgian chocolates? Well, we have got news for you, gourmand. All of your interests can be found in one fun powder—and it's a legal high.

The year was 2008. It started as a joke—a little wink and a nod to Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood.

French confectioner Dominque Persoone was, like many of us, probably well aware of the Stones' proclivity for Colombia's finest—but not wanting to flirt with the problematic legal aspects of giving Wood real-deal cocaine, he created snortable chocolate instead.

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Holy perforated septum.

In 2010, Persoone brought his chocolate to the International Chef's Congress in New York. One attendee described it thus: "At first my head spun a little and my body seemed to wonder what was going on. I did get a tiny buzz, but was mostly filled with the aroma of chocolate in my dizzy head."

Until recently, this cocoa-caine was only available to those who wanted to dole out 45 euros for their very own spring-loaded chocolate nose-catapult, which had to be ordered from Persoone's shop, The Chocolate Line, in Belgium. (The more industrious of us simply could have done a rail of Dutch-processed powder with a sawed-off Pirouline.)

Recently, however, a woman who goes by the name of Watermelon has begun selling hits of the chocolate for two bucks apiece at her Vancouver shop, Commercial Drive Licorice Parlour. Watermelon (also known as Mary Jean Dunsdon) told the Huffington Post that snorting chocolate—which is available in raspberry or ginger-mint flavor—is one of the finer ways of consuming it.

"The chocolate goes up your nose and settles into your sinuses and oral factory where most of your tasting happens," said Watermelon, who is also a burlesque performer, expert hula-hooper, and marijuana chef. "The tool never actually touches the nostril, but rather distributes the powder through the air and into the nose."

One might be curious as to why customers wouldn't prefer to just eat the chocolate the old-fashioned way (through their oral, rather than nasal, cavities). But like candy cigarettes or oxygen bars, that would just take some of the fun out of it, wouldn't it?

No word yet on whether the cocoa feels good on the gums.

This article was originally published on MUNCHIES on January 9, 2015.