{"id":3418,"date":"2014-05-27T17:16:22","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T17:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lbpost.com\/articles\/life\/my-night-as-a-guinea-pig-drinking-in-the-name-of-science\/"},"modified":"2014-05-27T17:16:22","modified_gmt":"2014-05-27T17:16:22","slug":"my-night-as-a-guinea-pig-drinking-in-the-name-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/hi-lo\/my-night-as-a-guinea-pig-drinking-in-the-name-of-science","title":{"rendered":"My Night As a Guinea Pig: Drinking In the Name of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"PrimeDrinking\"<\/p>\n

Hangover-for-sure recipe: PBR and Fireball, held by<\/em> Post writer Jason Ruiz. Photo by Dennis Dean.<\/em><\/p>\n

The marimbas of my iPhone sound off like a World War II air raid siren. Bombs were dropped and Bulleits were fired. I\u2019ve gone to war with my liver once again, leaving my head and insides feeling like a cratered Parisian avenue.<\/p>\n

The hangover has set in and the struggle is so very real.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the typical sentiment after a long night of painting the town red. Battered, broken and half asleep, I desperately echo the same thoughts as that child in the \u201cDavid After Dentist<\/a>\u201d video. Is this going to last forever? Is this real life?<\/p>\n

We live in a modern age where cars can park themselves and toasters can tweet<\/a>\u2014truly fascinating, mind-blowing advances. We\u2019ve eradicated smallpox but still countless people spend mornings lamenting a night filled with bad decisions, good drinks, and the best of friends.<\/p>\n

Then along came a Walter Thornburgh. This knight in shining armor also happens to be a senior microbiology major and chemistry minor at CSULB. Sir Walter tweeted the Post<\/em> last week stating he had found the Holy Grail of irresponsible drinking: he\u2019d synthesized a formula to make these tortuous mornings disappear forever: a cure for hangovers<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This kind of assertion cannot go unverified. I felt, as both a journalist and advocate for science, a personal obligation to the scientific community\u2014and the greater good\u2014to go down this rabbit hole and binge-drink in the name of journalism. The story of this noble savior needed to be told and his research substantiated.<\/p>\n

Our clandestine meeting happened at a 2nd Street coffee shop Memorial Day weekend where two-thirds of The Prime Company met myself and our web designer Dennis Dean. Prime, Walter\u2019s brainchild for the better part of a year, is a supplement designed to be ingested while drinking, its effects allowing you to live a pain-free existence in the morning. The prototype he brought for this experiment also resembles a number of illicit drugs when stored in a baggie like Walter had done.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never done any scientific tests where people inhaled it,\u201d Walter joked following my comment about doing rails of Prime off the bar top. \u201cSo, I don\u2019t know what the biochemical consequences of snorting Prime are. You\u2019re really playing with fire there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"20140515150119-1964898Over the course of the next hour, Walter and Marlo Miller (Prime’s public relations director) broke down the intricacies of Prime: how it works, how research was conducted, and how many intentional hangovers were doled out to the unfortunate placebo group. Both Long Beach natives have international roots and fittingly the seed of the idea was planted while on vacation overseas.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you go abroad, you want to drink, you want to go out, you want to do all that,\u201d Marlo explained. \u201cAnd the next day you also want to hit the Louvre and go see things in Madrid. You can\u2019t really do both.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walter eloquently broke down the inner workings of Prime, recounting the initial failures that he himself suffered through. I came into this experiment fairly skeptical. After all, could a 21-year-old college student on a shoe-string budget really accomplish such a feat in his spare time? Maybe I\u2019m a sucker for scientific poets, but listening to Walter rattle off six-syllable enzymes made me more at ease with my potential impending doom.<\/p>\n

\"PrimeInfographic\"Bear with me as I try to explain the science.<\/p>\n

When your body uses alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme to metabolize consumed alcohol<\/a>, it produces a by-product called acetaldehyde, a toxic substance that is a main contributor of hangover symptoms. Your body naturally produces two substances\u2014acetaldehyde dehydrogenase and glutathione\u2014that attack the acetaldehyde in your blood stream. However, it can only produce a finite amount. The remaining acetaldehyde wreaks havoc on the body in the interim while more glutathione and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase are manufactured.<\/p>\n

This is where Prime comes in.<\/p>\n

In a procedure that sounded more like dinosaur-building than hangover-remedy, Walter said he found a way to bridge the inadequacies of the body\u2019s depleted glutathione production. Unlike other products on the market, Prime aids the body\u2019s own natural production. According to his research (which included reagent, chemical, and chromatography testing) Prime resulted in a 73% reduction in acetaldehyde blood concentration.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s basically a jigsaw puzzle piece for your body\u2019s amino acids,\u201d Walter said. \u201cWhen you start drinking, your body starts producing the chemical building blocks of glutathione, but it can\u2019t quite make all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The group\u2019s branding of Prime has gone hand-in-hand with their research. In the surreptitiously scientific world Walter operates in, participant\u2019s urine is bartered for free booze. Those roughly 40 test subjects allowed him to devise and tweak his formula over the past six months from its original flavored malt beverage concept to the current state: a mix-in-a-liquid concoction composed of FDA-approved materials that\u2014if everything plays out well\u2014will be sold for roughly $3 at every BevMo!, 7-11, and bar in Southern California.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never gone into a situation trying to achieve a hangover; they usually just happened organically. It\u2019s such a foreign concept to set misery as the end game. But this night was different. This night was dedicated to science.<\/p>\n

The agenda for the night was to go against all conventional wisdom: we mixed Pabst Blue Ribbon and Fireball, beer-before-liquor, and any other wive\u2019s tale about drinking, shunning all logic in the name of achieving the slimiest, most downtrodden hangover possible.<\/p>\n

\"WalterThe integrity of the experiment was dependent on Dennis and I being coherent enough to remember to mix in our supplement with a glass of water\u2014which is recommended for every 1-4 drinks\u2014while not looking like we were sneaking off to enjoy some sweet, sweet nose candy. The prototype packaging and flavor were things Walter promised would be improved if Prime\u2019s Indie Go Go campaign<\/a> is successful.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we don\u2019t hit our mark, we\u2019ve been pro-bootstrappers up until now,\u201d Walter said. \u201cWe can operate on a shoestring budget but it\u2019s just going to delay the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for Walter\u2019s packaging to draw the attention of a surly bar owner. I\u2019m not certain if her comment about one of her regulars being a police officer was a threat, but her confiscation of our Prime made it clear that her establishment didn\u2019t support progress.<\/p>\n

The march to regret continued on like this for the next eight hours. Bar after bar, drink after drink, cab after cab, Dennis and I imbibed our shameful supplement concoction in alley ways and dark corners of dive bars. This was the first time I hoped a product review would turn out to be positive. Maybe that violates the ethics of journalism but my morning surely depended on it.<\/p>\n

I am an early riser and often times I forget that my phone is set to jar me out of bed at 6AM every day. That gets exponentially more annoying on mornings following nights like these, where excessive consumption has clouded my memory making me fail to slide that toggle switch to the off-position.<\/p>\n