A coffee shop in the centre of London on a dreary day in November, at about 11 o’clock in the morning. A bedraggled commuter wearing jeans, a red baseball cap and a worn backpack adds liberal amounts of cinnamon and sweetener to a cardboard cup of coffee before walking unenthusiastically towards the door. On his way through, he passes three businessmen with papers stacked neatly on a small table. Two of them ignore their half-drunk cups of espresso. The third absent-mindedly stirs a cappuccino.
The UK is a nation increasingly obsessed with coffee. The haggard supervisor of the small, central London café in which I’m sitting estimates that she sells around 800 cups a day or, as she also puts it, “a lot”.
And despite the recession, the UK coffee industry is growing fast. Â Between 2007 and 2010, the number of dedicated coffee shops in the UK grew by over a third.
The choice of different types of coffee is getting more and more complex. None of them, however, go to the extremes a colleague imagined as we queued for our third cup of the day: “Sometimes I wish I could just have coffee on a drip.”
Would that be possible?  The idea of “taking” food like drugs is already accepted:  people drink dissolved protein powder after going to the gym and a company called AWOL sells equipment that vaporises your favourite spirit so that you can inhale it.  Could coffee be vaporised in the same way as alcohol, and sold in cafes and office canteens?
After all, just as alcohol is the active and addictive drug ingredient in spirits, that of coffee is caffeine. This website calculates how much caffeine you would have to consume from everyday drinks to die from it. Still, swathes of students take caffeine as a tablet in the form of ProPlus. Â Is it so ridiculous to ask whether you could inject, or inhale coffee as well?
Breathing in that coffee smell
A lot of people rely on a morning cup of coffee to get going. Scientifically, drinking caffeine isn’t the most efficient way of getting it into your blood stream. “Nasal sprays are probably the quickest fix, as are microtabs,” explains Narina. She’s a pharmacist at a mainstream chemists’ chain. I asked her to talk me through the options smokers are offered if they want to crack their dependence on nicotine. Microtabs are small tablets you let dissolve under your tongue, an area which has a very good blood supply.
The nose and lungs are designed to deliver oxygen to the blood, simultaneously making them a speedy route for the delivery of other chemicals into the bloodstream. If coffee were to be converted into an inhaler form, it would deliver a short and almost instantaneous caffeine boost, but the effects would wear off fast. Â Â It would be perfect if you just need it to get up, but terrible if you suspect you might fall asleep halfway through the morning.
Covered in coffee
A steady, longer term way to deliver coffee is through the skin in the form of a patch. Â Patches are designed so that when they comes into contact with the skin, the drug in the patch travels slowly and constantly though the fabric of the patch over an extended period of time, for example 12 or 24 hours.
There is already a commercial and a do-it-yourself market in coffee beauty products.  Aside from lip balm that promises to taste like a latte and an old wives’ tale that covering your face in coffee grounds will improve your complexion, there are serious uses. For example, caffeine cream is used to reduce redness from dermatitis.
The pill
Because caffeine tablets already exist, and we know our digestive systems can handle coffee, it’s worth exploring the idea of actually making a coffee pill. Tablets are often made with lactose, a sugar found in milk, mixed with the active ingredient. The lactose makes the tablet large enough to handle. The amount of pure drug needed in a tablet is mostly is too small to be convenient.
Andy Jefferson researches drug administration at Imperial College London and, over a cup of coffee, I spoke with him about turning one into a tablet. “If you were to remove all the water from a milky cup of coffee, you would have some lactose but you would also have the fatty part of the milk, and I suspect that would make your tablet very – if you’re able to tablet it at all – make it very sort of sticky.”
So a milky cup of coffee wouldn’t work but, according to Jefferson, the solution would be to make a cup of coffee using lactose instead of sucrose to sweeten it. If you like your coffee with sugar (or sucrose), you could simply add a sugar coating around the tablet, something that is often done to make tablets easier to swallow. It’s therefore entirely possible to create pocket sized milky, sugary coffee tablet that you can easily carry around in your pocket.
Up the other end
The idea of rectal coffee delivery isn’t new. Coffee enemas have been known to cause digestive problems and even death. But while literally washing out the intestines by introducing coffee through the rectum has been proven to be an exceptionally bad idea,  inserting a small, dissolvable bullet-shaped globule of a drug, in other words a suppository, into the anus works brilliantly.
Suppositories work in a similar way to under-tongue pills: drugs are absorbed through the wall of the rectum into the bloodstream.
The reasons for using suppositories are mostly practical. Attilia Burke, a pharmacist, explained why you might prefer them: “For a baby it’s easier to use a suppository instead of… pills or something the baby could spit out.” But it’s not just for small children. If you are having difficulty swallowing or are frequently throwing up, using a suppository is a much more reliable way to ensure that the drug actually enters your system.
Suppositories are relatively slow-releasing and don’t need needles, inhalers or any other equipment.  A coffee suppository could give you a caffeine boost all morning while keeping your hands free.
Coffee on a drip
The difference between intravenous therapy, or an IV drip, and an injection into your vein is really only the duration. A drip can deliver medication slowly over long time spans, whereas an injection delivers a one-off dose.
An IV drip can deliver a very precise amount of a drug into the bloodstream, not something most coffee drinkers with a four-to-six-a-day habit are particularly worried about.
You can more or less inject the active ingredients of a sweet, but not milky, cup of coffee directly into the blood stream.  Pure caffeine can be delivered on a drip, and is an effective treatment for the headaches people experience after lumbar-punctures.   Glucose isn’t the sugar we normally put in coffee, but it does taste sweet and is also sometimes delivered intravenously, so by combining the two you can deliver sweet coffee directly into the blood.
As for actual coffee, no-one seems to have tried delivering it intravenously, although you can buy a t-shirt depicting coffee in an IV bag. A doctor I ran this notion past thought a person might be OK if they injected a very small amount into their blood, but that they would have to be incredibly stupid to try.
It’s about the chemistry
To truly get a grip on what might happen, you would have to analyse the individual chemical components of the coffee bean. Â Â Amongst them are numerous carbohydrates and acids, most of which are often processed by the liver and so, depending on where the coffee is injected, Â might not cause a problem.
But there are also minerals such as calcium and potassium.  Any individual cup of coffee contains quite a lot of potassium.  This often goes unnoticed because the diuretic effect of coffee can also cause low potassium, but that effect doesn’t matter if coffee were directly injected into the blood.
One the main effects of high potassium is a heart attack.  If that’s not enough to put you off, there’s also likely to be some fine fibrous matter from the husk of the coffee. Blood could clot around the fibre, thereby blocking circulation.
Basically, there’s a fair chance that I.V. coffee would kill you.
You could just drink it
Finally, you can drink some drugs, such as cough syrup, or dissolved aspirin.  Drugs given in liquid form have to contend with your stomach juices, meaning there is a very large level of uncertainty over how much eventually enters the bloodstream.  Actually, drinking coffee is not the way to go if you want enough coffee to stay awake through an exam without reaching the point where you get withdrawal headaches.  However, if you simply enjoy the taste of a good cup, irrespective of its clinical effects, whether or not the dosage is right doesn’t really matter.
That was certainly the choice of the three businessmen in the London cafĂ©, who seemed to be using coffee as a social tool rather than a drug. But the bedraggled commuter in the red baseball cap was almost certainly using his cinnamon-laced latte for a fix. Would he consider a more direct vector – a drip, suppository or nasal spray? Would you?
Image of making coffee over bunsen burners courtesy of Nomo123