Hey, Drunky! New “Hangover Patch” On The Market

What hangover remedy or preventative regimen do you swear by?  Do you blend 7/8’s of an organic banana with a drop of Amazonian rainwater, ground newt’s tail and pinch of ginkgo biloba? Do you watch The Notebook and cry all the alcohol out? Or do you grind up Advil and blow lines off your dog-eared copy of Bill W?

Whatever. Keep your voodoo magic. You know nothing actually cures a hangover other than time and more drinking (our preferred method, clearly). Don’t believe us? Mind then, the British Medical Journal’s finding that “No compelling evidence exists to suggest that any conventional or complementary intervention is effective for preventing or treating alcohol hangover. The most effective way to avoid the symptoms of alcohol induced hangover is to avoid drinking.”

Well, that last part sure is a buzz kill. Regardless, for every shyster with a million-dollar idea there are a million suckers who will pay him to try it. And because there’s a sucker getting drunk every minute, we give you Bytox.

Bytox is one of the first anti-hangover patches to hit the online market, the latest panacea in a spate of hangover “remedies” to show up wherever people are drinking to excess. To its credit, Bytox is doing something innovative: trying to corner the college market by hiring distributors on campuses. So far, Bytox pimps are lurking in purple Caddies at ten institutions of higher learning, including Princeton and Harvard.

Luckily, you don’t need a degree from the Ivies to figure out the instructions:  Drop the $2.99 for a patch (or $124 for 50 … black market markup at your discretion), stick it onto yourself an hour before your first shot of Jaeger, and keep it on for eight hours after your last turn through the vomitorium that passes for the bathroom at Drinker’s.  During that binge, the patch pumps you full of a tremendous amount of vitamins, including 4,160% of the recommended daily intake for B12 and a monstrous 10,000% of the recommended dosage for Thiamin (B1). There’s a lot of talk lately about how vitamin B helps detox the liver, and how you should replenish the B levels that get depleted when they go to work breaking down alcohol when you drink.

Maybe you’ve heard this. Maybe you’ve tried it. Maybe you’ve even been persuaded to slap on a Bytox patch after reading the Epicurious article whose author concluded that he felt “mostly fine” the morning after chasing it with six or seven glasses of Makers Mark (and, to be fair, a lot of water).

Conversely, perhaps you bring your brain cells home with you from the bar and choose to take your hangover with a bloody Mary and a nap. However, you win the official Foobooz hangover helper award if you just kamikaze through it, accepting that because you remember absolutely nothing about the previous night, you’d need a lot more than a patch to explain why there’s a tiger in your bathroom and you’re the proud new owner of a baby named Carlos.