"There’s really no negative publicity, so I felt we’re good to go."

Said the founder of the company that makes Coco Loko — snortable powdered cocoa infused with ginkgo biloba, taurine, and guarana — which Chuck Schumer just went on a rampage against.

You can buy Coko Loko at Amazon. It's only $24.99 for 1.25 ounces, where the comments are already infused with Schumerosity.

What Schumer said is: "I can’t think of a single parent who thinks it is a good idea for their children to be snorting over-the-counter stimulants up their noses. This suspect product has no clear health value." He wants the FDA to get involved because it's marketed as a drug. But it's just cocoa powder with caffeine (guarana), amino acid (taurine), and the extract of ginkgo leaves that has never been shown to do anything.

But I guess it's the fact that they're telling you to take it in through the nose that stimulates the anti-drug sensibilities. If finely ground coffee were sold as snortable, I guess it would be the same problem. It brings out the prudes, anything that suggests that a drug-related mentality will accompany the use of the product. It's really a desire to regulate thoughts. Don't even think of getting high.

This relates to the way marijuana is wedging its way to legality. The medical/"medical" use was forefronted to numb the prudes' censoriousness. God FDA forbid anyone should actually have fun.

By the way, you can still buy candy cigarettes. How we enjoyed all the nicotine we only imagined... back in the old days, before the Baby Boomers matured beyond the 1960s "If it feels good, do it" to the sick fun of restricting the pleasure of others.

Do people even remember the 60s slogan "If it feels good, do it"? It's talked about in this 1996 NYT review of the book "The Pleasure Police/How Bluenose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists Are Taking All the Fun Out of Life."

"If it feels good, do it!" was the moral imperative at Woodstock, but since the advent of Jimmy Carter, the nation has been swept by a counterrevolution. Now the rule is: "If it feels good, it must be risky and bad, immoral and dangerous to your health."...

A new complicity has grown up between the religious Ayatollahs on the right and the sanctimonious alarmists on the left, united in their common determination to make everything we touch or ingest illegal, immoral or fattening. In chapters devoted to eating and drinking, smoking and making love, Mr. Shaw documents the excessive prudery and exaggerated warnings that have come to surround our every indulgence. In American culture, all universal sources of pleasure are eventually medicalized, then politicized and finally policed (if not prohibited): witness alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, fat, pornography, masturbation, perfume. Mr. Shaw aptly quotes H. L. Mencken's eternal definition of puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." All our most intimate spheres of solace and release are exposed to the prurient curiosity of those who cannot themselves enjoy, because of the envy they feel. We Americans, with our Puritan ancestors, are different from, say, the French, who are too busy passionately pursuing their own pleasure to worry much about other people's....

Speaking of puritanism and the special problem of snorting, I'm thinking of this Prince lyric, from "Pop Life":

What you putting in your nose?
Is that where all your money goes (is that where your money goes)
The river of addiction flows
You think it's hot, but there won't be no water
When the fire blows

I don't know where Prince is now, but he's starting at long last to put his videos on YouTube. I wish "Pop Life" were one of the first few to go up but it's not. This might do in a pinch.

Hey, that reminds me: Can you still get Pop Rocks candy? Yes! But — stand down, Schumer — the FDA did get involved:

Rumors persisted that eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda would cause a person's stomach to boil and explode.... One of these myths involved a character named Mikey from the Life cereal commercials.... The Food and Drug Administration set up a hotline [in Seattle] to assure anxious parents that the fizzing candy would not cause their children to choke.... On the very first episode of MythBusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman put the Mikey rumor to the test...

By the way, Mikey (John Gilchrist) is still alive as is the myth that he died from Pop Rocks:

In Shrek The Musical (2008–2010), one of the main characters, Donkey, sings a song "Don't Let Me Go". In the song, he is begging Shrek not to leave him and starts naming things that go together. He sings, "like Cupid and Psyche, like Pop Rocks and Mikey!"