A Drunk's Best Friend.(Antipokhmelin)

Everyone and his grandmother has a cure for a hangover. But whether it's a raw egg for breakfast, a feast of menudo (boiled tripe), a swig of pickle juice, a handful of aspirin or a hair of the dog that bit you, few remedies actually do the trick. An inventor from Russia, of all places, has finally stepped up to the plate. SKS Alyans, a Moscow firm, is marketing a pill called Antipokhmelin--"anti-hangover" in Russian. The pill is selling steadily in pharmacies across Russia, and it's proving even more popular in the United States under the name of RU-21, where it's been promoted as an invention of the KGB.

The official story behind Antipokhmelin's arrival is more a case of the Waiting Game than of Spy vs. Spy. In 1972, in Pushchino, a small town south of Moscow, a young Soviet researcher named Yevgeny Mayevsky developed a harmless compound, containing succinic acid, that seemed to eliminate hangovers. He tested his pills on dozens of eager volunteers willing to drink 200-gram vodka shots, and the government gave him a production license, conditional on his finding a manufacturer within six months. But in those cold-war days, no one had money for hangover remedies. So for 28 years the pill's only beneficiaries were Mayevsky's family and friends. The rest of the world was stuck with raw eggs.

In 2000 a former colleague of Mayevsky's who had acquired business connections in Russia took the concoction to SKS Alyans, which started mass-producing it. Now it's available to us all. And in part thanks to its alleged KGB connection, which CEO Dmitry Myasnikov neither confirms nor denies (Mayevsky says it's a "fairy tale"), the pill has received much ...