[eric_h]

As an aside, I know this simply from experience with taking drugs recreationally. Chewed or otherwise ground up pills hit you faster, and I've found dissolving a ground up pill in hot water is the winner, as far as time to kick in.

Pharmaceutical pills have all sorts of additives intended to delay the release of the active chemical, recreational pills have an obviously less rigorously tested version of the same.

My mother, a (retired) cardiovascular pharmacologist, taught me that the quality/effectiveness of those additives is often what differentiates brand name drugs from generics (sometimes significantly, admittedly she's been retired for quite a while now, so that information might be out of date, but she actually did some professional research on the subject back in the day).

I'll never forget the time when I, at about the age of 11, was sent in to the store to buy a big bottle of Aleve that my mom was going to "smuggle" across the border to Canada for her sister (Naproxen was prescription only at the time in Canada, but available OTC in the US - amusingly, Tylenol w/codeine was the inverse). I bought a generic naproxen sodium instead (thinking I was so clever for saving about half the money I'd been given), and I got chewed out and sent back into the store to replace it. That was what she got for teaching me to actually read the active ingredients of drugs on the label ;)