Boozer, bamboozled!
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Our intrepid reporter tests the latest hangover cure on the market
by CHRIS BARRY
It's been a long time since I've had much faith in the sorts of drugs and herbal cure-alls that you can buy from the back pages of a magazine. I remember being 13 and tremendously excited about this legal marijuana substitute they used to advertise in Rolling Stone which was purported to get you good and fucked-up for about $5 an ounce. There was a plethora of these companies back then, selling all kinds of herbal party drugs that were 100 per cent legal and supposedly as good or better than the real thing. Fake cocaine, acid, junk--all in enormous quantities at bargain basement prices.
Except none of them ever got you high. Which probably should have come as no big surprise, but being a mildly retarded adolescent, I stubbornly refused to believe that any of these oh-so-reputable companies would point-blank sell a product to teenagers that they knew was bogus. I just couldn't fathom it. Shucks, selling drugs that didn't work, well, that was... dishonest.
So instead of simply taking it on the chin and feeding my 60 pounds of legal herb and organic Dilaudid to the pigeons who used to congregate on our high school football field, I'd knock the shit back until I felt nauseous and convince myself that this was the legal high I'd bought into. It wasn't a great buzz, to say the least--it usually culminated in vomiting, but this way I didn't have to admit I'd been duped.
Through experience I've come to the opinion that the vast majority of commercial hangover cures are about as effective as herbal LSD. There are plenty of products on the market, but they all seem to be manufactured by shady little companies from dodgy places like New Zealand and tend to reek of scam. It also doesn't help that I've never tried a hangover cure that was even remotely effective.
The call of nature
The popular consensus is that the only way to effectively take the edge off the morning after is to drink seven or eight gallons of water before you go to sleep and maybe knock back a couple of aspirins while you're at it. Something I'm personally usually too drunk to remember to do at five in the morning. Besides, unless I'm hooked up to a catheter bag, I'd rather deal with a hangover than be forced to pull myself out of bed every 10 minutes to relieve my bladder of the ocean of urine that this method produces.
Recently, no less a company than Jamieson Laboratories, by all means a pretty legit vitamin manufacturer, have gotten into the game and come out with their own preventative hangover medication called Dr. Pierre Swaab's Anti-HangOver cure. The good Dr. Swaab says his product is safe, pure and natural, containing no ASA or Acetaminophen. In other words, there's probably nothing in it that works. But hey, you never know, anything is possible. Certainly a mega-corporation like Jamieson would never try to mislead the public. Last week I decided to pay the 10 bucks and test it for myself.
Dr. Swaab claims that if you take two or three of his miracle tablets while you're busy getting fucked-up, you'll wake the next morning feeling fresh as a daisy. Okay, maybe it's true that on the night of my experiment I kind of outdid myself as far as mixing my booze was concerned. And maybe the packet of Dr. Swaab's by my side had given me the false sense of security I needed to swig back those last few Jaegermeister shots. But I swear to God that the day after my Dr. Swaab drinking binge I woke up with the worst fucking hangover I've had in decades--a wicked nasty headache, a sandpaper dry throat, and a whole lot of good old-fashioned toilet worship. I'm used to feeling like crap in the morning, but this was truly something exceptional.
Now, whether my wretched condition was a direct result of Dr. Swaab's doodoo, I cannot say for sure. But I can report with 100 per cent certainty that this medication did absolutely nothing to spare my hangover. Apart from not having saved me, all evening and into the morning I kept burping up the active ingredients of "the cure," a gross blend of herbal crap and something called Botanical complex Ak280. If you think beer breath makes you unattractive, see how the barflies react when you gas 'em with a little Ak280.
To be fair to " the doctor," I suppose I should mention that my control group for the evening, a frequent hangover sufferer who goes by the name of Harry Glickman, groggily called me up the next morning to state that "the cure" had him feeling slightly less hungover than he had expected, all things considered. But I think he's deluding himself, looking for hope where there is none, which I suppose is fine if it makes him happy. I intend on hooking up with him again this weekend. I've got a little herbal LSD locked away that I think he might be interested in purchasing.
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