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 m lange 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.

Adriano Sack is a freelance journalist living in New York City.
Ingo Niermann is a writer living in Berlin.