Can anyone tell me about the interaction of powdered sugar and food coloring? I need to make pills again (not placebo this time, but legal substances), and this time I need differently colored ones to mark different dosages. I planned to use powdered sugar as filler, as the average pill would be filled to about 1/5 of its capacity with the substances in question. Recently, while in an altered state, I was suddenly struck with the idea of putting a bunch of powdered sugar in a Ziploc baggie, pouring some food coloring in and shaking it up to make colored filler. Will this work? Will the coloring “stick” to the sugar? Will the resulting mixture be difficult to pack into gelcaps? Might the mixture hinder the absorption of the substance in the pills, or affect said substance in any way?
If this is absolutely a no-go, is there another good way to distinguish the pills from each other? They will all contain the same substance, but will contain significantly different dosages and it will be extremely important that it will be easy to tell one from the other. Is there something I could use to write the dosages on the gelcaps that’s safely edible, perhaps? Different colored pills would be better because the people who are counting the pills may be in a state that might affect efficient reading of numbers.
Actually, now that I think about it, will powdered sugar itself possibly pose a problem as a filler? Is there something better to use that I can easily get, preferably without a credit card?