Snorting Modafinil 101: What You Need to Know

You sit down at your desk and swallow your small 200 mg modafinil tablet.

Now you need to keep yourself occupied long enough for the modafinil to take its effects— which can take as long as an hour and a half in some cases.

There must be a faster way to get the effects of modafinil.

Some people have suggested snorting the medication — a method commonly used with other drugs to deliver nearly instant effects.

Can modafinil be snorted?

Perhaps an even better question— should modafinil be shorted?

We investigate these questions and more in detail.

A Quick Primer On Modafinil

If you’re researching “snorting modafinil”, it’s likely you already know what the deal is with the drug. If this is the case, keep scrolling to the next section.

For those that don’t know what modafinil is, here’s a quick primer on the drug, and why people like to take it.

Modafinil is a eugeroic. This means its a compound that makes us feel awake.

It stimulates the brain by increasing neurotransmitters like dopamine, norepinephrine, orexin, and histamine.

Prescription use of modafinil is indicated for treating conditions involving “excessive sleepiness”. This includes narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and shift work sleeping disorder.

The military has used it in their fighter pilots and special forces to keep them awake on long and tiresome missions.

Students, freelancers, and business executives often use it to enhance their productivity, allowing them to get through their heavy workloads effectively.

Modafinil also has the ability to help us concentrate on the tasks at hand. It does this by increasing dopamine concentrations in the brain which is associated with focus and concentration.

How To Buy Modafinil

Modafinil can be bought at your local pharmacy. In order to do this, you need a valid prescription from a doctor and a lot of money.

Modafinil purchased from the pharmacy can cost as much as $51 per tablet!

Another option is to buy your modafinil through online vendors like Afinil Express. 

Here, you have the option between four different types of modafinil; Modalert, Modvigil, Waklert, and Artvigil. If you enter the coupon code MODAFINILOTC during checkout you can save an additional 10% off your order.

Why People Snort Medications

The medical word for snorting a substance is called insufflation.

Insufflation doesn’t technically require someone to inhale, all it entails is that powder is blown or forced into a body cavity. This can be done with a special applicator or by snorting it using your own lung capacity.

There are Actually a Few Good Use-Cases For This Mode of Administration:

1. Asthma Medications

These medications are aerosolized drugs insufflated into the lungs to reduce swelling and inflammation. They’re life-saving medications used by millions of people each day.

2. Anesthesia

Anesthesia is the process of knocking someone out and keeping them unconscious during surgery. It involves insufflating gaseous compounds into the lungs of patients.

3. Migraine Medications

There are a few migraine medications, such as Onzetra Xsail® that are applied by snorting. It comes in a convenient applicator that allows you to insert one end of the device into your nose and the other into your mouth.

You then blow on the mouthpiece, forcing particles into your nose where they can exert their benefits quickly and effectively.

4. Flu Vaccines

There are a few flu vaccines that are offered as a nasal inhalation format instead of the traditional injection. At the moment, these vaccines are only being used in at-risk populations and are not yet given to the general public.

You can expect to see more of this in the next couple of years.

Snorting Brings Faster Effects

One of the main reasons people snort medications is because it allows the drug to enter the bloodstream faster, taking just a few seconds to start exerting its effects.

There are Two Reasons for This:

1. It Has A More Direct Route To The Bloodstream

There are thousands of tiny blood vessels at the back of your nose that allow drugs to enter the bloodstream with little effort. These capillaries have a high surface area and allow the drug to pass through and into the bloodstream very efficiently.

The journey modafinil takes in the nose is fast and very straightforward, no map needed.

Compare this to the digestive tract, and there are a lot more obstacles to face before the drug finally enters your bloodstream.

They need to first survive the acidic environment of the stomach, followed by the alkaline environment of the duodenum, followed by the interaction with other compounds taken in the form of food and drink.

It’s also at risk of being destroyed by the billions of bacterial species living inside the intestinal tract.

The journey through the digestive tract is long and harrowing. More than half of the compound is lost before ever making it into the bloodstream (only about 40–65% of modafinil is absorbed through the oral route).

2. It Avoids First Pass Liver Metabolism

The other reason why snorting is faster is that the compounds absorbed through the nose don’t go through the liver right away.

The liver detoxifies our blood. It does this by metabolizing chemicals into smaller, inactive and water-soluble compounds. Whenever we eat something, it enters our bloodstream just ahead of the liver, allowing the vast majority of it to flow directly through the liver where it gets a chance to process as much of it as it can.

This takes out a lot of the active components and can slow the onset of effects.

When you snort something, however, it enters the bloodstream far away from the liver, dramatically reducing the rate of metabolism and allowing the effects to hit harder and faster.

Snorting Makes A Drug More Effective

Snorting doesn’t allow for as much wastage as taking it orally.

This can be seen with the most commonly snorted drug, cocaine.

If you were to eat the same amount of cocaine that you snort, you would barely feel anything at all.

The bioavailability of a drug taken by snorting is significantly higher than the same drug taken orally.

Can Modafinil be Snorted?

Technically, you can snort anything that can be turned into a powder or aerosol. However, the better question might be “should you snort modafinil?”

There’s a company based out of The United States selling “snortable chocolate.” It’s called Coco Loko.

The company that makes it, Legal Lean, is marketing it as a means of delivering a steady buzz. All you have to do is rail a thick line of… chocolate?!

Sure, chocolate can be snorted… but why even bother? Chocolate tastes great and can deliver the same buzz by eating it.

Eating chocolate also comes with the benefits of not causing you to drip snotty chocolate sauce out your nose for the rest of the day. It’s not a good look no matter how buzzed you might feel.

Although nearly everything can be snorted, few things need to be.

Modafinil falls into this category as well.

The argument is that the drug can be used more efficiently if snorted than taken orally, and the effects come on faster.

Here Are 3 Arguments That Debunk These Issues

1. Modafinil Manufacturers Already Took The Absorption Issues Of Modafinil Into Account

The company that first brought modafinil to market, Cephalon Inc, was well aware of the inefficiency of modafinil absorption. This is actually very common in the world of oral pharmaceutical medications.

The solution is to figure out what the rate of absorption is (in the case of modafinil about 40–65%), then adjust the dose accordingly.

If we had a 100% absorption rate, modafinil would be sold primarily in 100 mg doses Since we know that we lose about half of it, we simply take a 200 mg dose instead.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

There’s no need to give yourself a nosebleed just to improve the effectiveness of modafinil. If we want a higher dose, simply take a higher dose orally.

2. Modafinil Costs Between $0.80 and $2.80 Per Dose

(Prices obtained from online modafinil retailer Afinil Express)

If you’re taking brand name modafinil, which can cost as much as $51 per dose, then you may have a valid reason to try and make the medications you have more efficient.

However, a better solution is to source your modafinil at a better price.

Online vendors like AfinilExpress.com sell generic versions of modafinil (which are virtually identical to brand name versions) 89% cheaper!

If you have access to cheap modafinil, you don’t need to risk damaging your nasal passage with snorting it to get the potency you want. You can simply take more of the drug if you really wanted to.

3. Waiting 45 Minutes For Modafinil To Kick In Isn’t Very Long

Modafinil is not a party drug… that is unless your idea of a party is studying particle physics all night until the early hours of the morning.

People use modafinil to keep themselves awake and to get shit done. It’s a productivity enhancer and a smart drug. If you can’t wait 45 minutes for it to kick in before spending the next 10 hours straight crossing items off your to-do list, this may not be the drug for you.

If this is a problem, try taking your modafinil before you need it. Perhaps on your way to work, or while you eat so that it starts to kick in around the time you’re all finished and ready to get started kicking your to-do list’s ass.

The Problem With Snorting Modafinil

Snorting modafinil effectively isn’t as easy as you might hope.

Powdered drugs, like Onzetra or cocaine, are manufactured with snorting in mind. They don’t have any binders or fillers.

They don’t have these compounds because they don’t need them.

Tablets on the other hand, almost always have binding and filling agents because if they didn’t, they would fall apart in your hands long before you ever got them into your mouth.

These binder and filler agents can be harsh on the nasal passage and will damage the tiny capillaries lining the nostrils.

Can You Remove The Fillers?

Fillers in modafinil can be removed, but not easily.

They need to be dissolved into a solvent and recrystallized to purify the modafinil.

Other methods involve centrifuges, which spin a mixture of modafinil and solvent at high speeds to separate the compounds by weight.

Most people looking to snort modafinil don’t have these tools available to them to go through this process.

Snorting Modafinil Safely

Although it’s probably clear by now that we don’t recommend you snort your modafinil, mostly due to the fact that it’s unnecessary, it can damage your nose, and is a pain in the ass to do correctly, here’s how it can be done should you still want to try it.

1. Grind the Modafinil Into A Fine Powder

In order to snort modafinil, it needs to be ground up into as fine a powder as possible.

Any large pieces are going to enter your nose like a piece of glass, tearing apart the walls and damaging capillaries. This will cause pain and bleeding and may gradually start to diminish your sense of smell. It can also make it easier for infection to set into the damaged tissue, increasing your chances of developing sinus infections.

The best way to do this is with a mortar and pestle.

2. Cut It Up Even More With A Razor Blade

We can’t emphasize enough how important it is that the powder is as fine as possible. After you think its powdered enough from the mortar and pestle, place it on a piece of glass or another hard surface and cut it up with a razor blade.

The final product should be finer than dust.

Some people will even sift this through a 5 or 10-micron screen to make sure they’ve powdered it enough.

3. Weigh Out 100 mg Or Less

Since the absorption rate through snorting is so much more efficient, you need to take a smaller dose to receive the same effects. Underestimating this can cause you to take too much, which comes with all kinds of unwanted side effects.

Start with about 100 mg or less.

4. Insufflate Using a Tube or Sniffer Tool

The next step is to snort it.

You can do it the old fashioned way by rolling up paper bills ($100 bills work best, we’re told) and snorting it through the middle.

You can also buy powder sniffers that add some style to your snorting experience. Some will even allow you to sort through both noses, which helps prevent concentrating it into one nostril only.

Share the love right?

Conclusion

Although it’s possible to snort modafinil, we don’t recommend it.

Modafinil comes in doses carefully designed to take into account wastage during the absorption process. It contains binding and filler agents that are necessary during the manufacturing process to keep the tablet together without falling apart. Many of these compounds can damage the sensitive capillaries in the nose.

Keep the powders for snorting and the tablets for swallowing.

Modafinil works perfectly fine as a tablet and snorting it will only take extra effort, can be damaging to the body, and serves us little benefit.