nose beer

It is always the way with recreational drugs that are illegal that they acquire a number of slang names.  After all, you don’t want to shout out ‘I’m doing cocaine tonight’.  Much better to announce that you are having a couple of nose beers.  This term has moved on from nose candy, an item from the late 1920s in America. Coke is even earlier — 1890s. There are a number of terms which originate in America but nose beer is all our own and relatively recent. It is listed in Betoota-isms (pub. 2021) along with Bondi marching powder (based on Colombian marching powder) and Prahan pixie dust.