  We investigate the direct production of supersymmetric scalar taus at the
LHC. We present the general calculation of the dominant cross section
contributions for hadronic stau pair production within the MSSM, taking into
account left-right mixing of the stau eigenstates. We find that b-quark
annihilation and gluon fusion can enhance the cross sections by more than one
order of magnitude with respect to the Drell-Yan predictions. For long-lived
staus, we consider CMSSM parameter regions with such enhanced cross sections
and possible consequences from recent searches. We find that regions of
exceptionally small stau yields, favoured by cosmology, are in tension with a
recent CMS limit on m_stau.
