The Romans of the Decadence (detail), by Thomas Couture, 1847. Musée d’Orsay.
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Miscellany
The questions “Have you ever used Derbisol?” and “How often?” sometimes appear along with questions about alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana use on youth-risk surveys for students. Derbisol is a fictitious drug devised to test the reliability of the responder. In one survey, 163 of 894 students said that they had tried Derbisol—or 18.2 percent.
I am sure of this: that if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would not be half the disorders in the world there are now.
—Jane Austen, c. 1798
