If beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy, then the Zaca Recovery Patch is proof he doesn’t want us to be hungover in church.
Full Disclosure: The folks over at ZacaLife.com did not send these to me. Nope. I got a free sample when I got my Freedom Flask in the mail (More on the Freedom Flask later). The patches worked so well I ordered more– just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.
Now if you’ve been a regular reader of The Drunk Pirate then you know Nate and I have tried our fair share of lotions, potions, pills, and home-grown hangover cures. Most commercial hangover remedies are souped-up vitamins. They don’t work because of basic biology. If you replace depleted vitamins in your body while drinking plenty of water in a given period of time you will start feeling less like a dump truck full of garbage and more like your old self – Unless of course, you feel like a dump truck of garbage on a normal day.
That being said, Zaca Recovery Patch is the first and only hangover cure I have tested that actually works. Period.
My First Experience with the Zaca Recovery Patch
I first tried the Zaca patch during a Memorial Day Weekend camping trip. The instructions are pretty simple: “Place the patch on your skin before you begin drinking and leave on for 24 hours.” Now, ladies, you can get away with the option of putting it on your bikini area so it isn’t seen. DO NOT PUT IT ON OR NEAR YOUR PUBES. THE GLUE THEY USE IS RIDICULOUS.
Being a guy, I chose the manly option of slapping it on my shoulder and calling it good. This was a problem. No less than five people (drunk shirtless rednecks) came up to me and said something to the effect of, “Hey man, how’s the patch workin’ for ya?” The first time it happened, I gave the guy a confused look. I said, “Don’t know, haven’t gotten drunk enough to see.” To which I got an equally confused look. And then the reply, “What’s drinking got to do with a nicotine patch?”
Wearing this thing on my arm while shirtless and drinking Natty Light out of a can had taken me to white-trash-trying-to-quit-smoking-level-10. The next day I would just wear it on my left ass cheek. Wearing it on my bikini line just wasn’t an option.
We floated down the river, drank, ate, drank, played beer pong until 4 am, and finally fell asleep right before dawn to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” playing on repeat in some distant truck stereo.
About 4 hours later my eyes opened. I lay still, assessing my overall feeling of feeling like shit. Other than feeling a little tired and sunburned, I felt pretty damn good. As soon as I came to the conclusion that I had, in fact, drank for 16 straight hours and gotten 4 hours of sleep in a tent and felt completely normal, I sat up to check on my buddy Dave.
Dave resembled what someone in a concentration camp would look like if the camp were filled with spikey hair people who wore bathing suits. He did NOT have a Zaca Recovery Patch on. I had to leave a few hours later and went home, mowed my yard and started drinking again. I would later find out that Dave would have to call his wife to get him because of the severity of his hangover.
At the end of 24 hours, I put on another patch and got the same results the next morning. Granted I didn’t drink the same extent, but I got the same results nonetheless.
The Real Test – 5 Days In New Orleans
After it’s strong showing at the Memorial Weekend camp out, I decided to throw the kitchen sink at both myself and Zaca. Five days in New Orleans
If you’ve never been to New Orleans before, let me sum it up for you:
It’s a thoroughfare of bars and Jazz clubs competing for your patronage. Three-for-one drink specials, all-day happy hours, no cutoff time and jazz music blaring from every alley and dilapidated, voodoo-esque doorway. And everyone stays hammered. All day and night.
The first night we scored some tickets to the House of Blues and saw quite possibly the best concert ever. A Prince cover band called “1999”. I alternated between locally brewed Abita Turbodog and Smirnoff with Redbull. I was drinking like I didn’t have shit to do the next day. The truth was I needed to be at the convention center at 8 am to talk to doctors, nurses and vendors until 6 pm with no break.
This would be the true test of the little 2-inch miracle patch I was wearing on my arm.
The next morning I slowly opened my eyes fully expecting to feel like I had been repeatedly jackhammered by Bill Goldberg.
Nothing.
The only thing I felt was a voracious hunger pang in my stomach. As I lay there, my wife woke up and asked me how I felt. “Fanfuckingtastic” I replied. To which she replied with a look of utter disbelief, “How?”
I hadn’t told her about the patch yet. Once I filled her in she demanded one and promptly put it on.
Over a breakfast of fried catfish and grits – Yes, catfish and grits for breakfast…with wasabi sauce. That’s how good I felt – I told my boss and his wife about my new best friend, the Zaca Recovery Patch. Over the next 4 days, each morning, I gave everyone their Zaca Recovery Patch for the day.
We drank like it was our job for those next four days. No one was ever hungover. Ever.
Sometime later I would put Zaca Recovery Patch through the gauntlet during a 4-day stint in Vegas. Same results.
Kids, I get nothing from the folks at Zaca for telling you to buy this product. If there’s something on the market that works better, I haven’t seen it.
Ordering Zaca my friend, belive me, im a kind of person that feel very very bad during 2 days after, and almost 3 im not good enough. Im drinking wisky with sugar free seven up, and i have tried a good gin with the same, i have tried drinking a lot of water and nothing helps too much… so i think is the moment to try stuff like this, i hope is going well.
Here at Magipatch (http://magipatch.com) we have created a patch that delivers the medication needed to endure the hangover and in most cases let the celebration go longer with enhanced alcohol consumption while using our hangover remedy patch.
We would love to send a sample to the site’s moderator to give it a try and let us know your thoughts.
Another element could be, to piggyback on what Satan Augustine said is, since you feel
like you have the patch on your side, you will go out longer and push the chance that you will still have ethanol in your system when you wake up. So, depending on you, your still “drunk”
The byproducts are what make you feel like trash. A solid eight hours of sleep after getting blasted during happy hour is the perfect stew for a horrid morning.
PS: I wish such a thing worked for me because I hate hangovers. One of the downsides of being a skeptic I guess. However, if you wanted to send me a free sample, I wouldn’t say no. ; ) But there seems to be no logical mechanism via which the patch would work. The constituent ingredients, with the possible exception of Prickly Pear (which, according to one study, appears to have some mild positive effects on hangover, though not genuinely statistically significant when compared to placebo), have not been proven to have any effect on hangover whatsoever. In fact, unless one is an alcoholic or has a thiamine deficiency, none of the other ingredients would have any positive effect at all. That said, if it works for you, keep using it (it certainly should cause no harm). Maybe the combined effects of the placebo and the moderate effects of the Prickly Pear are enough for some people. If so, great!
I appreciate the info your website offers.
From the Zaca website:
“These topical patches have not been clinically tested and therefore are not clinically known to have any efficacy beyond that of a placebo topical patch.”
In other words they know they are placebos. Mind you, the placebo effect consists is a genuine physical response: endorphin is released, resulting in pain relief, and dopamine is released, resulting in increased feelings of well-being. The placebo effect relies on the expectation that the curative will work although some of this happens below the level of conscious awareness. For whatever reason, some people are more prone to the placebo effect than others. Additionally, the placebo effect only works for illnesses that respond to the increases in endorphin and dopamine. Given it’s typical symptoms (headache, nausea, bodily pain, lethargy) a hangover is the perfect condition for effective placebo treatment.
I just ordered a pack of 6 patches. I read so many amazing reviews but it’s so hard to believe. I get the worst hangovers ever and I party every weekend. If this stuff actually works I’m buying a truck load.
ordering a CASE of these as a parting gift for a friend’s bachelor party – gotta make sure my boy makes it the altar!