99 Fun Facts About Drugs and Alcohol

Which soft drink did John Pemberton create in 1886 after Atlanta went dry, as a booze-free take on his wine tonic?

Coca-Cola was Pemberton's answer to local prohibition, and its recipe kept cocaine from fresh coca leaves until 1903. The company switched to 'spent' leaves, then a cocaine-free extract.

Which amendment, the only one ratified by state conventions rather than legislatures, repealed US Prohibition in 1933?

The 21st is also the only amendment ever to repeal another, wiping out the 18th after nearly 14 dry years. Utah cast the deciding ratification on 5 December 1933.

Which stimulant, legal and largely unregulated almost everywhere, is the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug?

Caffeine has an average half-life of about five hours in healthy adults, so half of an afternoon coffee's dose is still in the blood at bedtime.

Which First Lady's answer to an Oakland schoolgirl asking what to do if offered drugs became a 1980s anti-drug slogan?

Nancy Reagan's reply, 'just say no', gave her anti-drug campaign its name after pupils in Oakland started a club under the slogan. Betty Ford's name went on a rehab clinic instead.

Which October campaign began in DEA agent Enrique Camarena's California hometown after his 1985 murder in Mexico?

Red Ribbon Week began as people in Camarena's hometown wore ribbons in his honour, and it is now observed every October in schools across the United States.

Which Viennese neurologist praised cocaine in an 1884 paper, long before he turned to psychoanalysis?

Sigmund Freud urged cocaine on a close friend as a cure for morphine addiction; the friend became hooked on cocaine instead, and the episode tarnished Freud's medical reputation.

Which island was ceded to Britain 'in perpetuity' by the Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War in 1842?

Hong Kong Island went to Queen Victoria as a crown colony, the price the Qing paid for losing a war sparked by Britain's opium trade. Macau was already Portuguese.

Gram for gram, pure alcohol has nearly twice the calories of sugar and is beaten by only which nutrient?

Fat packs 9 calories a gram against alcohol's 7 and sugar's 4, which is why a night's drinking adds up faster than people expect.

Beer stronger than 2.25% stayed banned in which country until 1 March 1989, a date it now celebrates as Beer Day?

Iceland let wine and then spirits back in, but kept strong beer banned for fear that the cheaper drink would mean more drinking.

Which tier of the US Controlled Substances Act, for drugs with 'no currently accepted medical use', holds heroin and LSD?

Schedule I is the top tier of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, while cocaine sits a rung below it in Schedule II because surgeons still use it as an anaesthetic.

Which per se drunk-driving limit did Utah adopt in 1983, before it became the norm in every other US state?

0.08% became the US norm only after 1983, when Utah was the first state to drop from the old 0.10% standard; Utah then went first again, down to 0.05%, in 2018.

Nearly all addictive drugs, by different routes, raise which neurotransmitter in the brain's reward pathway?

Dopamine surges in the nucleus accumbens are what make a drug reinforcing, whether it is a stimulant, an opioid or a drink. Repeated floods of it are what the brain adapts to.

Alcohol is classed as which type of drug, whatever the lively mood a first drink or two produces?

Depressant is the label because alcohol decreases the electrical activity of neurons; the early buzz comes from loosened inhibitions, not stimulation.

Which Chicago gangster's Prohibition bootlegging empire ended with an 11-year sentence for tax evasion in 1931?

Al Capone was suspected of buying special treatment in his first federal prison, so in 1934 he was moved to newly opened Alcatraz, where the syphilis he had long carried wore him down.

Which country, led by José Mujica, became the first in the modern era to legalise recreational cannabis in 2013?

Uruguay sells it through licensed pharmacies to registered residents, who are fingerprint-checked at the counter and capped at 40 grams a month.

Which opioid antagonist, carried as a nasal spray by police and bystanders, can restore breathing after an overdose?

Naloxone, sold as Narcan, blocks opioid receptors for only 30 to 90 minutes, shorter than many opioids last, so a revived person still needs medical care.

Which first breakdown product of ethanol, more toxic than alcohol itself, causes the facial flush some drinkers get?

Acetaldehyde builds up when the enzyme that clears it works slowly, a trait most common in people of East Asian ancestry, and it is also thought to add to hangovers.

Coffee and cold showers do nothing to sober a drinker up, so what alone lowers blood alcohol?

Time is the only cure because the body clears alcohol at a steady pace of roughly one small drink an hour; coffee just makes a wide-awake drunk.

Which benzodiazepine, invented by Leo Sternbach at Roche, was America's best-selling medication through the 1970s?

Valium, the brand name for diazepam, sold more than 2 billion tablets in 1978 alone; its forerunner Librium was an accident, its calming effect noticed only when the compound was tested in 1957.

Which European country decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, referring users to 'dissuasion commissions'?

Portugal kept drugs illegal but made possession of up to a ten-day supply an administrative matter, a public-health bet aimed at the HIV epidemic among injecting users.

Which compound, first isolated by Raphael Mechoulam in 1964, is the main psychoactive ingredient of cannabis?

THC is one of at least 113 cannabinoids identified in the plant; Roger Adams had made it from CBD in 1942, but Mechoulam's team was the first to isolate it from cannabis itself.

Morphine was named by its discoverer Friedrich Sertürner after Morpheus, the Greek god of what?

Dreams were Morpheus's realm, and Sertürner chose the name because his drug, thought to be the first alkaloid ever isolated from a plant, tended to send people to sleep.

Opium is the dried latex scraped from the scored, unripe seed pods of which flower?

Poppy pods are slit by hand once the petals fall, and the gum that dries on them is the raw material for morphine, codeine and heroin.

Which mountain range's people have chewed the cocaine-bearing leaf against altitude sickness for at least 8,000 years?

Andes communities still chew the leaf and drink it as tea; the oldest evidence of the habit turned up in house floors in Peru's Nanchoc Valley. The leaf is under 1 percent cocaine.

Which gas in cigarette smoke binds to haemoglobin about 240 times more tightly than oxygen, starving tissues of it?

Carbon monoxide locks onto haemoglobin as carboxyhaemoglobin, which is why a smoker's blood carries less oxygen to the heart and muscles than a non-smoker's.

Which scarring of the liver, unlike the fatty-liver stage before it, cannot be reversed even if a heavy drinker quits?

Cirrhosis develops in only 10 to 20 percent of people who drink heavily for a decade or more, though more than 90 percent of heavy drinkers get a fatty liver first.

Which US president called drug abuse 'America's public enemy number one' at a 1971 White House press conference?

Richard Nixon's words gave the press its 'war on drugs' headline, and two years later he folded federal drug enforcement into a single new agency, the DEA.

Which US state, alongside Washington, was the first to legalise recreational cannabis by popular vote in November 2012?

Colorado's Amendment 64 led to the first state-licensed retail shops, which opened their doors on 1 January 2014, a year before Alaska and Oregon followed.

Pablo Escobar was shot dead in 1993, a day after his 44th birthday, in which Colombian city that also named his cartel?

Medellín was overlooked by La Catedral, the prison Escobar had built to his own design and walked out of in 1992; police shot him on a rooftop in the city the following year.

Which 1919 law, passed over Woodrow Wilson's veto, set the rules for enforcing US Prohibition?

The Volstead Act defined an 'intoxicating beverage' as anything over 0.5 percent alcohol, which outlawed ordinary beer along with whisky. It took its name from Andrew Volstead, the Minnesota congressman who managed it.

In the US, a spirit's 'proof' is what multiple of its alcohol by volume, a term born of old gunpowder tests?

Double the ABV makes an 80-proof whisky 40 percent alcohol; the old test soaked gunpowder in spirit and called it 'proof' if the powder still burned.

Which country's drinking guidelines count alcohol in 'units' of 10 ml, advising adults to keep to 14 a week?

The United Kingdom introduced units in 1987; one is roughly what an adult processes in an hour, and a 750 ml bottle of 12 percent wine holds nine.

Coffee keeps you alert by blocking the brain's receptors for which naturally sedating chemical?

Adenosine builds up in the brain the longer you stay awake, and coffee's trick is to park in its receptors so the sleepy signal never lands.

Which country became the first in the world to ban smoking in all enclosed workplaces, pubs included, on 29 March 2004?

Ireland's ban reaches company cars, taxis and vans as well as pubs, and Norway brought in a similar law on 1 June the same year; Scotland followed in 2006.

Which country was first to force cigarettes into logo-free, drab dark brown packs, from 1 December 2012?

Australia's government research found Pantone 448 C to be the least attractive colour of all; it was first described as olive green, until the country's olive growers objected.

Which Swiss chemist took the first intentional LSD trip on 19 April 1943, a date now celebrated as 'Bicycle Day'?

Albert Hofmann deliberately swallowed what he assumed was a cautious dose of the compound he had first made in 1938, then tried to ride his bicycle home from the Sandoz lab as the effects took hold.

Which 1936 film, financed by a church group as a warning to parents about cannabis, became a cult comedy decades later?

Reefer Madness was originally titled Tell Your Children, and an improper copyright notice left it in the public domain for 1970s campus screenings.

Which spirit's 18th-century London craze prompted Hogarth's 1751 print of a drunken mother letting her baby fall?

Gin Lane, paired with the cheerful Beer Street, was issued to back the Gin Act of the same year, which pushed sellers into licensed premises.

Which anise spirit was banned in France in 1915 over fears it drove drinkers insane, a law not repealed until 2011?

Absinthe's wormwood was blamed for hallucinations that modern studies say it never caused; its fearsome reputation was mostly down to the alcohol.

Whose 1985 Soviet anti-alcohol campaign sent sugar sales soaring as citizens began distilling their own drink at home?

Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign raised drink prices, limited sales to afternoon hours and shrank the country's vineyards, yet home distilling surged to fill the gap.

Which organisation did Candace Lightner found in 1980 after a repeat drunk driver killed her 13-year-old daughter?

MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, began in California after the hit-and-run driver who left Cari's body at the scene turned out to have a fresh DUI arrest.

Alcoholics Anonymous dates its birth to 10 June 1935, the day a surgeon in which Ohio city took his last drink?

Akron surgeon Bob Smith drank one last beer that morning to steady his nerves for an operation, and the fellowship he built with Bill Wilson dates its founding from it.

The 1984 US law pushing states to a drinking age of 21 threatened to cut 10 percent of what federal money?

Highway funding was the lever because drinking ages are set by the states, and the Supreme Court upheld the tactic in 1987; Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands kept 18 and took the cut.

Which synthetic opioid, up to 100 times as potent as morphine, drove US overdose deaths above 100,000 a year by 2022?

Fentanyl is so potent that a tiny amount can kill, and many people take it without knowing, in counterfeit pills; synthetic opioids were involved in about 74,000 US deaths in 2022.

Heavy drinkers risk Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome, a brain disorder caused by a shortage of which B vitamin?

Thiamine (vitamin B1) runs short because heavy drinkers eat poorly and absorb less of it from food, and the damage can leave people filling memory gaps with invented stories they believe.

How does the WHO's cancer agency classify alcoholic drinks, a verdict it first reached in 1988?

Carcinogenic to humans is the agency's top-risk Group 1, which alcohol shares with asbestos and tobacco, and the WHO says no level of drinking is safe for health.

Who ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, pushing the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act with lurid 'Gore Files'?

Harry Anslinger collected stories of cannabis causing crime and violence while ignoring evidence that pointed elsewhere, and took them to Congress as testimony.

Which synthetic opioid, developed in Germany in the late 1930s, is given daily in clinics to relieve opioid cravings?

Methadone was the work of Gustav Ehrhart and Max Bockmühl, and one dose holds off withdrawal for about 24 hours, which is why clinics can give it once a day.

Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik, a smoker who wanted to quit, is credited with inventing which product, first sold in 2004?

The e-cigarette he patented in 2003 was branded Ruyan, meaning 'like smoke', though tobacco firms had been working on nicotine vapour devices since the 1960s.

Which Pfizer pill, launched in 1998, was first tested as a heart drug for the chest pain of angina?

Viagra was made by Pfizer chemists in Sandwich, Kent, and early trials showed little effect on angina but a marked side effect. Pfizer switched course and sold it for erectile dysfunction.

Which lemon-lime soft drink originally claimed to contain lithium citrate, a mood-stabilising drug?

7UP lost its health claims in 1936, when the US government forced the maker to drop them. One theory holds that the number in the name nods to lithium's atomic mass of about seven.

Aspirin traces back to salicin, a 2,400-year-old fever remedy found in the bark of which tree?

Willow bark's salicin turns into salicylic acid in the gut, the medicinally active compound. By 1899 Bayer was selling a synthetic relative around the world under the name Aspirin.

Which antibiotic did Alexander Fleming find when mould spoiled a plate during his 1928 holiday?

Penicillin went by the name 'mould juice' for months before Fleming christened it in March 1929. He had seen bacteria dying around the stray fungus and famously remarked, 'That's funny.'

Which breakfast fruit can raise blood levels of over 85 medicines by disabling a gut enzyme?

Grapefruit carries compounds that knock out CYP3A4, an enzyme that breaks down almost half of all medicines. The damage is permanent, so the gut has to build fresh enzyme before doses behave normally.

Which wrinkle-smoothing injection was first approved in 1989 for crossed eyes and eyelid spasms?

Botox began as Oculinum, a muscle-relaxing 'eye aligner' first injected into patients in 1977. Allergan bought the maker and adopted the snappier trademark years before the wrinkle boom.

Which blood thinner, launched in 1948 as a rat poison, was later given to President Eisenhower?

Warfarin takes its name from WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, plus the ending of coumarin. It entered medicine after a US Navy inductee survived swallowing it in a 1951 suicide attempt.

Which bitter malaria drug, isolated from cinchona bark in 1820, gives tonic water its taste?

Quinine also makes tonic water glow under ultraviolet light. The mixer was first marketed as a way of delivering the drug to people who needed protection from malaria.

Which morning-sickness sedative, kept out of the US by Frances Kelsey, harmed over 10,000 babies?

Thalidomide was pulled from European shelves in 1961. Kelsey, an FDA reviewer, had refused to clear it without better safety evidence, a stand that earned her a medal from President Kennedy the following year.

Which toxic alcohol in tainted moonshine can blind drinkers as the body turns it into formic acid?

Methanol poisoning is treated with fomepizole or, if none is at hand, ordinary drinking alcohol. Doses as small as 4 to 15 mL have reportedly caused irreversible damage to the optic nerve.

Which cholesterol pill, generic name atorvastatin, earned Pfizer over $125 billion by 2012?

Lipitor at its peak brought in $13 billion a year and supplied up to a quarter of Pfizer's revenue. By 2003 it was already the top-selling medicine in the United States.

Levothyroxine, the thyroid pill sold as Synthroid, is built around four atoms of which element?

Iodine is why the hormone is nicknamed T4: each molecule carries four atoms of it. The thyroid cannot make its hormones at all when the diet lacks the element.

Which first-choice pill for type 2 diabetes grew out of research on the folk remedy French lilac?

Metformin belongs to the biguanide family, traced to a plant also known as goat's rue. Its sister drugs phenformin and buformin were both withdrawn, leaving it the family's survivor.

Which asthma reliever, launched as Ventolin in 1969, is known in the United States as albuterol?

Salbutamol is the international name and albuterol the American one for the same airway-opening drug. David Jack's team discovered it in 1966 at the Allen and Hanburys laboratory in Ware, England.

Which heartburn brand of omeprazole was renamed in 1990 to avoid mix-ups with the diuretic Lasix?

Prilosec replaced the drug's original name, Losec, at the request of the FDA a year after it reached American pharmacies. In 2003 it became the first over-the-counter option of its kind for frequent heartburn.

Zolpidem, a sleeping pill linked to sleepwalking and sleep-driving, is sold under which brand name?

Ambien users have been reported walking, eating and even driving while not fully conscious. One US congressman, stopped for erratic driving at 3 a.m., said he did not remember getting out of bed.

Alprazolam, a fast-acting tranquilizer for panic disorder, is sold under which brand name?

Xanax and alcohol strengthen each other's effects, a mix that can cause severe sedation. The drug was developed at the Upjohn Company and approved in the United States in 1981.

Which Eli Lilly antidepressant, launched in 1988, gave Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1994 memoir its title?

Prozac earned $350 million in US sales within a year of launch. Wurtzel wanted to call her book 'I Hate Myself and I Want To Die' until her editor talked her out of it.

Which ADHD drug, first made in 1944, did chemist Leandro Panizzon name after his wife Marguerite?

Ritalin borrows the nickname of Marguerite Panizzon, known as Rita, who took the stimulant herself. Its generic name is methylphenidate.

Epinephrine, the drug in an EpiPen, is better known outside the United States by which name?

Adrenaline was a registered trademark in the United States, so American medicine adopted epinephrine as the generic name. Jokichi Takamine first purified the hormone in 1901 from the glands of sheep and oxen.

Lisinopril, an ACE inhibitor with roots in pit viper venom, is mainly prescribed to lower what?

Blood pressure is the main target of the class, which began with captopril, a drug modelled on a peptide in the venom of Brazil's jararaca viper. Lisinopril is a synthetic derivative of it.

Loratadine (Claritin) and cetirizine (Zyrtec) ease hay fever by blocking which chemical's receptors?

Histamine sets off the sneezing, itching and hives of an allergy. Both pills are second-generation antihistamines that enter the brain less than older ones, so they cause less drowsiness.

SSRI antidepressants such as sertraline (Zoloft) block the reabsorption of which brain chemical?

Serotonin stays active between nerve cells once its transporter is blocked, and mood shifts follow only gradually. The full name spells it out: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

Which hair-loss treatment, sold as Rogaine, began as a pill for hypertension?

Minoxidil surprised researchers in 1971 by making hair grow, and a lotion version was approved for baldness in 1988. Its effect is fully reversible and does not prevent hair loss in the long term.

Which painkiller did Boots chemist Stewart Adams first test on his own hangover?

Ibuprofen was discovered in Nottingham in 1961 and first sold as Brufen, a prescription drug for rheumatoid arthritis. It reached the United States in 1974.

Exenatide, a diabetes drug approved in 2005, copies a peptide from the venom of which reptile?

Gila monster venom drew scientists' interest because the lizard eats only once or twice a year. In 1992 a researcher isolated a peptide from it, exendin-4, that lowered blood glucose in diabetic mice for hours.

Which hormone, first injected into 14-year-old Leonard Thompson in Toronto in 1922, tamed diabetes?

Insulin's patent was handed to the University of Toronto for a token one dollar. Frederick Banting and Charles Best had isolated the hormone from a dog's pancreas the summer before Thompson's injection.

Acetaminophen, the painkiller sold in America as Tylenol, goes by which name in Britain?

Paracetamol and acetaminophen are both shortenings of one chemical name, para-acetylaminophenol. The American word was coined by McNeil Laboratories in 1955 and the British one a year later.

Which heart drugs ending in '-olol' are banned in Olympic shooting for steadying tremors?

Beta blockers slow the heart and calm shaking hands. North Korean pistol shooter Kim Jong-su lost two medals at the 2008 Olympics after testing positive for one of them, propranolol.

Which anaesthetic did John Snow give Queen Victoria during the births of her last two children?

Chloroform was risky to dose until Snow built an inhaler in 1848 that regulated it and cut the number of deaths. Victoria's two babies were Leopold and Beatrice.

Which party drug did Merck's Anton Köllisch first make in 1912 while seeking a bleeding remedy?

MDMA was only a stepping stone for Merck, which patented the route to get around a rival's patent and took no interest in the compound itself. Company records show researchers returning to it only sporadically.

Which compound powers the 'magic mushrooms' Gordon Wasson wrote up for Life magazine in 1957?

Psilocybin was isolated from the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana in 1958, a year after Wasson's article 'Seeking the Magic Mushroom'. The body quickly converts it into psilocin, the form that acts on the brain.

Which Vietnam War anaesthetic has a form approved in 2019 as a nasal spray for depression?

Ketamine was first made in 1962 from the hallucinogen phencyclidine, in search of a safer anaesthetic with fewer visions. Recreational users know it as 'Special K'.

Which Amazonian brew of vine and DMT-rich leaves has a Quechua name meaning 'liana of the soul'?

Ayahuasca works only as a pair: alkaloids in the vine block an enzyme, monoamine oxidase, that would otherwise stop the DMT from working when swallowed. Recipes vary greatly from one shaman to the next.

Which small, spineless cactus is a sacrament in all-night ceremonies of the Native American Church?

Peyote contains mescaline, which makes up as much as 6% of the cactus once dried. Indigenous peoples of the Americas have used it in ceremonies and folk medicine for more than 5,000 years.

Which leafy stimulant, first grown around Harar in Ethiopia, is chewed across Yemen and Somalia?

Khat contains cathinone, a stimulant that brings sociability, excitement and mild euphoria. Chewing it in its home region is a social custom older than drinking coffee.

Which California city's high-school students, the 'Waldos', coined the cannabis code '420' in 1971?

San Rafael High School's Waldos met at 4:20 p.m. beside a statue of Louis Pasteur to hunt for an abandoned cannabis crop. Their code later spread among followers of the Grateful Dead.

The first CBD medicine, approved by the FDA in 2018, treats rare childhood forms of which condition?

Epilepsy syndromes named Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut were the first approved uses of the medicine, sold as Epidiolex. CBD is short for cannabidiol, and the product is a solution taken by mouth.

Which cartel did Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán lead between prison escapes by laundry cart and tunnel?

Sinaloa's boss left one maximum-security prison hidden in a laundry cart in 2001 and another in 2015 through a tunnel dug into his cell. He also pioneered long tunnels under the US border for moving drugs.

Tobacco belongs to which plant family, along with tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants?

Nightshade crops such as tomatoes hold only trace amounts of nicotine, while tobacco leaf is up to 3% nicotine by dry weight. Tobacco extracts have been sprayed on plants as an insecticide since at least 1690.

Which illegal Prohibition-era bars, raided yet highly profitable, included New York's '21' Club?

Speakeasies were named for the habit of speaking quietly about them so as not to alert police or neighbours. One popular tale credits saloon owner Kate Hester, who told rowdy patrons of her unlicensed bar to 'speak easy'.

A drinker's swaying and stumbling is thought to reflect alcohol's effect on which part of the brain?

The cerebellum coordinates balance and fine-tunes movement, and doctors call the drunken unsteadiness ataxia. Years of heavy drinking can cause lasting damage there, leaving an unsteady walk even when sober.

The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, a revolt against a liquor tax, flared up in the west of which state?

Pennsylvania farmers often used whiskey as money, so the excise felt like an income tax that easterners escaped. George Washington rode at the head of 13,000 militiamen to end the revolt.

Which temperance crusader, arrested at least 32 times, smashed up Kansas saloons with a hatchet?

Carrie Nation paid her jail fines with lecture fees and by selling stick pins shaped like hatchets. She called her bar-wrecking raids 'hatchetations'.

Alcohol makes drinkers urinate more by suppressing which hormone made in the hypothalamus?

Vasopressin, also known as antidiuretic hormone, normally tells the kidneys to hold on to water. With less of it released, urine production climbs.

Which thickener in illicit vape cartridges did the CDC link to the 2019 lung-injury outbreak?

Vitamin E acetate was used to bulk out weak cartridges because it looks like the cannabis oil it dilutes. Cases declined after September 2019, the month health agencies warned the public off such products.

Aspirin and other NSAID painkillers block which enzyme, as John Vane's Nobel-winning work showed?

Cyclooxygenase, or COX, makes the prostaglandins that drive inflammation but also protect the stomach lining. That two-sided job is why these pills so often irritate the gut.

Which 1906 law, signed by Theodore Roosevelt, first made US medicine labels list opium and alcohol?

The Pure Food and Drug Act was a truth-in-labelling law spurred by exposés such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, published the same year. It led to the creation of the FDA.

The symbol Rx abbreviates which Latin word meaning 'take', the first word of medieval prescriptions?

Recipe opened a medieval prescription as an order to the apothecary, followed by the list of materials to compound. The crossed capital R that abbreviates it is recorded in 16th-century manuscripts.

Which bitter stimulant in chocolate, slow for dogs to break down, makes the treat poisonous to them?

Theobromine takes its name from the cacao genus Theobroma, Greek for 'food of the gods'. Dark chocolate holds up to ten times as much as milk chocolate, so it is far more dangerous to a dog.