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By The Canadian Press

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ST. JACOBS, Ont. - How to slay a man with a toothpick:

1. Dip the toothpick into a bottle of Hell's Inferno hot sauce.

2. Dare the man to taste it.

Due to the an evolutionary glitch hard-wired into the man's brain - a glitch shared by most men, especially the manliest among them - he will be unable to resist the dare.

Within moments, he will be slain. Not dead per se, but perhaps wishing he was.

Ask Mark Borkowski:

"Oh," he says. "Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's hot. Oh. Ouch. Wow. Ooooh."

He continues in this vein for a few moments until he finally loses the ability to verbalize and then just pants, tongue out, like a hairy dog on an August afternoon.

Borkowski's willing submission to such torture may seem weird - masochistic, even - but the strangest part is that he has punished his taste buds like this many, many times before.

"I am an addict," he says when he regains the use of his tongue. "It gives me a buzz."

That buzz - caused by the rush of painkilling endorphins, which are basically the body's natural version of morphine - is what keeps Borkowski and other confessed "chiliheads" coming back to Taste, the hot sauce emporium in St. Jacobs, near Waterloo. Even for a heat junkie like Borkowski, however, Hell's Inferno sauce packs an almost unbearable wallop.

In the world of preposterously hot sauces, Hell's Inferno - made from the dreaded Naga Bhut Jalokia pepper of North India - is among the tongue-scorchingest.

On the Scoville scale, the standard measure used for gauging spiciness, it measures 1.5 million units (just shy of police pepper spray.)