The Larely Beagle – The Community Newspaper of Larely, California

After nearly 25 years of painstaking research and development, a UC-Larely Chemistry Professor has finally perfected a new drug for Huey Lewis. The professor, Dr. Charles Osborne hailed the finding as “realizing his life’s dream”.

The project was put into action in February of 1984, when Osborne first heard Huey’s song “I Want a New Drug”. He recalls, “I just remember hearing this powerful song and it impacted me on a deep, deep level. You could just hear in his voice that he was yearning for this new drug and was so bummed out it didn’t exist. It was at that moment that I decided to spring into action.”

Osborne, who had just been added to the Chemistry Department at UC-Larely because of his work creating anti-rejection drugs for transplant patients, switched gears immediately. “I abandoned the transplant field that moment and went straight to doing the lord’s work of developing Huey’s new drug.” However, that process turned out to be anything but easy.

“I figured it’d take me three or four years to perfect it, but I just kept encountering problems. Early versions of the drug made people talk too much, so we added some sedative to it. Then it made people sleep all day. We made some more tweaks and thought we were finished. Then, we noticed that it made people’s faces break out. It went on like this for years… we’d fix one problem only to have another one pop up.

Osborne also experimented with different ways that the drug could be taken. “We knew it couldn’t spill or come in a pill, so we needed to find a way to make it self-contained but prevent it from having to be swallowed. After extensive research, we found the best way to do this was to make it a chewing gum.”

Once the drug was put into chewing gum format, it was ready to take on its final hurdle. “It was making people feel three feet thick.” said Osborne, “So we decided just to load that thing up with nicotine and caffeine to get their heart rate up a little bit. After that last modification, it was ready for Huey.”

Once Osborne had a few packs of the gum packaged and ready for consumption, he got a hold of Lewis, who was appreciative, but said his drug days were behind him. However, after talking to Osborne for a few more minutes, Lewis decided to come out of retirement for this drug. After all, it was Lewis who implored someone to create it.

The two met up later that week, and as Lewis put the piece of gum in his mouth, Osborne became emotional and said, “It may have cost me my marriage, my relationship with my children, and my house, but in the end, it was totally worth it. It’s like Thomas Edison once said about his trials and tribulations in inventing the light bulb, ‘I have not failed 1000 times. I have successfully discovered 1000 ways to not make a light bulb’. I feel the exact same way about my work. I didn’t fail in my quest to create a new drug for Huey, I just found thousands upon thousands of ways to not make a new drug for Huey.