How to Spot a Psychopath

If you're looking for a pill that "Delivers Powerful Mind Expansion!", allows you to "Surpass Current Human Capabilities by 3,000 Years!", allows you to engage in astral projection and, you know, generally opens up the metauniverses of time, space and love to your liberated Klein-bottle superconsciousness - good news!

There are plenty of those!

Unfortunately, they're mostly illegal. The ones that're legal, unless you're living in some country where the jerks in government have absent-mindedly failed to ban certain plants, usually suck.

Which brings us to the magnificently insane "Magneurol6-S", also billed as the "Psychic Pill" (man, this post is gonna suck in some choice Google ads).

Magneurol is guaranteed to do exactly what it's promised to do, which is to say, awaken you to the fact that you are an earthbound god spinning your own mandala of truth and inspiration between the 512 dimensions of the Machine Elves.

The guarantee may well be genuine. If you're daft enough to buy these pills in the first place, I bet you're also daft enough to believe they work, especially if you help 'em along a bit with your favourite entheogen. If you're just not fantasy-prone enough to talk yourself into believing the pills are working, then you may well still be happy to believe that this is because you weren't reverent enough, and you just have to buy more (only $US49 for a 30 day supply!) and keep trying.

Magneurol is so named because it contains, wait for it, magnetite. OK, a "proprietary blend" of "Magnetitum", officially, but they're happy to call it magnetite elsewhere.

This is, I think, genuinely a bit of a new one. Nutballs of all kinds love to use magnets externally, but eating magnetic substances, not so much.

(If you decide to eat whole magnets, by the way, it's recommended that you stop at one.)

Along with the magnetic iron oxide, Magneurol also gives you a handful of vitamins, and a couple of chemicals that may or may not have something to do with neurotransmitters. But it really doesn't matter, because Magneurol is a pill. When you eat something, you digest it, breaking it down into simpler chemicals that the body may or may not later recombine into the same compounds you originally ate.

This fact is a bit of a problem for the quacky-dietary-supplement industry in general. People buy, for instance, shark cartilage pills, because they've been told that sharks don't get cancer, and then they eat them, and the magical shark cartilage is broken down like any other protein (well, insofar as the human digestive tract can break down cartilage - have you noticed people eating a lot of ears and noses?), and nothing happens.

(Oh, and sharks do get cancer, by the way. Of the cartilage, too.)

If you eat magnetite, I'm afraid you will not, as the Magneurol pushers suggest, end up with mystic magnetic particles in your third eye, or whatever. (Actually, they bang on about mysterious tiny bacteria that super-psychic animals are meant to have in their brains, or something.)

If the pills actually do contain magnetite then eating them will, at best, give you a bit of iron supplementation. Most of the magnetite will just go harmlessly through you. Some will dissolve in your stomach acid (if, unlike me, you have plenty of that), and in the process it will stop being magnetite and start being unmagnetised ions in solution, with which your body will do what it can.

I'm sure that your magnetite-laced poo will be very, very psychic, though.