The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends: A Very Trippy Miscellany

Read Adriano Sack's posts on the Penguin Blog.

“Curiouser and curiouser” —fun and fascinating facts from the world of drugs.

Following in the tradition of The Ultimate Book of Useless Information, The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends is a wry potpourri of interesting information about every conceivable kind of drug. Readers can feed their heads with anecdotes, facts, lists, statistics, and illustrations, including:

• The test results of animals on LSD—cats lose their fear of dogs, and goats walk in geometric patterns
• Drugs found in nature, from magic mushrooms to St. John’s wort to beaver secretions
• Celebrities who overdosed at age 27—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, and Jean Michel-Basquiat
• Imaginary drugs in literature and film, from spice the mélange in Dune to Moloko plus in A Clockwork Orange
• Nicknames for a joint—from doobie to giggly stick to Mr. Boom Bizzle
• The global percentages of adults who have used cannabis—.004 percent in Singapore and 12.6 percent in the United States
• The uses of opium in ancient Rome—from treatments for insomnia and epilepsy to colic and deafness
• The most glamorous rehab clinics and their celebrity alumni
• Mini-biographies of the biggest drug kingpins around the world

Wacky but well-researched, unbiased and shameless, The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends dares to take readers on a long, strange trivia trip.