Uppers.

Ramping up my excerciseousness and writey goodness, I find my energy levels could do with a boost. The obvious thing to do in a city just swimming with dance drugs would be to purchace some of said recreational pharmeceuticals and ingest, with hilarious consequences, yet I am loth to do this. I'm not getting any younger and I'd like to preserve a little of my fragile bone density (not to mention my fragile grip on reality).

No, I'm looking for something a bit less toxic, like ephedra or whatever. So far I've drawn a blank, though I've yet to hit the Chinese herbalists. There's always pseudoephedrine, but the most popular brand of pseudoephedrine-containting pills also has paracetamol, which I don't take unless I really need to.

Spain seems on the whole to take a much more relaxed attitude than the UK: shrooms seem to be legal here which is nice. I'm wondering if I couldn't get something a bit more efficacious that Sudafed over the counter here, but the internet is proving unhelpful. I can't very well stride into the pharmacy, collar the dude behind the counter and yell: "Déme las drogas del estimulante! Ahora! Déme LAS DROGAS!"

Or can I?