Edinburgh Evening News   Jan 29, 2004

    TONYA MACARI

Need a pill for your hangover or RU-21?

THERE are certain aspects of everyday life which most of us would cheerfully say "cheerio" to if we could. Bills, parking tickets, a wasp invasion during the barbecue season and spam mail in the inbox are obvious targets - and wouldn’t it be great to give the heave-ho to being hit by a hangover?

The simultaneous sensations of a sledgehammer swinging on one’s skull, a stomach swishing with acid and a throat which feels like it’s been fitted with a smoke-infused shag pile is far from pleasant.

For many of us who overindulge and who have forgotten to a) line our stomachs beforehand and b) down a vat of water during or after consuming large carafes of Chianti, it’s a feeling that is unfortunately all too familiar.

Hangover was not part of my vocabulary until I reached my early 20s. Like most youngsters I managed to swig my way through the average student-style Saturday night without suffering anything more serious than sore feet from stomping around Bristo Square in unsuitable shoes and indigestion from one bite too many of a speedily scoffed doner kebab.

Like many of my friends, I could happily put away half pints of snakebite in Potterrow and glug down glasses of cheap grog without having to worry about feeling grotty the next day.

And then, out of the blue one Sunday morning, I woke up a ghastly shade of green, felt like I’d spent the night rolling around the deck of a roll-on roll-off ferry during a particularly rough Channel crossing, and said "hello" and "go away!" to my first hangover.

Since then, I have tried various methods to counter the ill-effects of occasional over-indulgence. There have been over-the-counter remedies and old wives’ tales involving raw eggs, Irn Bru and "hairs of the dog" with varying degrees of success.

The best coping strategy is, of course, to just hide in a dark room, bribe the children to keep quiet and demand toast and tea at regular intervals for as long as you can get away with it.

But now it seems, scientists have developed a pill which may banish Sunday morning blues and make hangovers history. The RU-21 pill, which is a mixture of amino acids and vitamins - which supposedly prevent the body from making an enzyme which turns alcohol into a tissue-damaging chemical - was originally developed by Soviet scientists during the Cold War and is now on sale in the United States . . . and available here via the internet.

Gosh, imagine how different life would be minus the Sunday hangover. Sales of ready meals and super-size pizza would plummet as, without unwelcome waves of nausea sweeping over us at the sight or smell of 90 per cent of all - healthy - foodstuffs, we would no longer feel faint on opening the fridge door or stirring the odd saucepan of soup.

The telly bosses wouldn’t bother scheduling soap omnibus editions at lunchtime, as everyone would be out and about and not slumped like large lumps of lard on the sofa, and as plans to do more than just veg out could be made, early-evening queues at the video store would diminish or disappear.

Mind you, magic post-party pill or not, it would, of course, be a whole lot healthier if we could just learn to not drink one too many in the first place. As prevention is supposedly better than cure, perhaps what we need is a Saturday tea-time tablet to tell us when our bodies need to stop sipping the Sauvignon, which, however bitter a pill, wouldn’t be a hard one to swallow.