Shabu: Pharmaceutical-Grade Meth

You know you’re getting good drugs when they are delivered in the figure of a Japanese demon. The Denver Westword talks about “Shabu,” pharmaceutical-grade methampetamine hydrochloride and three-day parties fueled by the stuff. Unlike street meth, which is 10 to 20 percent methamphetamine (and 80 to 90 percent razzle dazzle!), shabu is over 95 percent delicious. Of course, it seems even cooler when it has a neato Japanese name and isn’t just called “pure meth.”

A little vaporized blip from shabu will keep you pepped for 12 hours. It sounds less like a party and more like a programming marathon.

Speed-binge supplies of a different nature have been cached in a master-bathroom medicine cabinet — one bottle holding ninety Valiums and another with forty tablets of ProVigil, the market name for the experimental drug Modafonil, a sleep suppressant the U.S. military tested on fighter and bomber pilots in Afghanistan and Iraq. Modafonil is now prescribed for cancer patients to combat the chronic-fatigue side effects of chemotherapy. Nick has laid in a supply because he claims he’s found that combining Modafonil with Shabu takes the edge off the undesirable psychological whammies of sleep deprivation, including auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions.

72-Hour Party People [Westword via Kottke]