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The professor, an expert in how drugs affect the brain, says it should soon be possible to get drunk safely ¿ by consuming ¿healthy alcohol'
The controversial former government drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, has boasted that he is on the threshold of inventing what sounds like the answer to many a sandpaper-tongued Sunday-morning lament.
The professor, an expert in how drugs affect the brain, says it should soon be possible to get drunk safely — by consuming ‘healthy alcohol’.
He has been experimenting with laboratory-created substances that will supposedly allow people essentially to switch intoxication on and then off again.
First, you drink a glass of his synthetic creation, designed to produce the same happy, fuzzy feeling engendered by a moderate amount of alcohol.
Then, once you tire of being drunk, you simply swallow an antidote pill to sober you up instantly.
Professor Nutt, who works at Imperial College London, and has spent most of his working life treating alcoholics, says harm-free booze would ‘revolutionise’ healthcare. ‘These ambitions are well within the grasp of modern neuroscience,’ he says.
The professor, it must be said, has a notorious record as a self-publicist and has previous form in championing ‘healthy’ inebriation.
He was sacked from his post as the Government’s chief drugs adviser in 2009 for declaring that cannabis, Ecstasy and LSD are less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes.
Indeed, he claimed taking Ecstasy is no more dangerous than riding a horse.
Despite widespread criticism that downgrading Ecstasy would send out the wrong message and could convince youngsters it was all right to take the drug, he put his thesis to the test in a stunt on Channel 4 with an ‘experiment’ on several participants.
True to form, Nutt recently posted a blog celebrating his self-administered experiments with alcohol.
‘After exploring one possible compound, I was quite relaxed and sleepily inebriated for an hour or so, then within minutes of taking the antidote I was up giving a lecture with no impairment whatsoever,’ he said.
He claims to be experimenting with substances that copy the way in which alcohol affects one of the brain’s chemical transmitter systems.
This system is called gamma aminobutyric acid (Gaba). Its job is to ‘keep the brain calm’, says Nutt. ‘Alcohol relaxes users through mimicking and increasing the Gaba function.’
The problem is that alcohol also potentially causes aggression and addiction, not least because of the way it releases people from their inhibitions.
Nutt says that ‘in theory’ he can create a substance that ‘makes people feel relaxed and sociable, and remove the unwanted effects’.
That sounds hugely ambitious, if not deluded.
Professor Nutt says he may have invented alcohol that gets you drunk without the hangover
For one thing, he seems to ignore the fact that for many, if not most, of us who like a drink, any enjoyment of the intoxication is secondary to the appreciation of the peaty tang of a 12-year-old Islay whisky, for example, the intense fruitiness of a fine Shiraz or the complex bitterness of a Belgian beer brewed by monks.
All of these drinks have a unique taste and are steeped in culture and heritage to which the good professor seems oblivious.
Presumably, in Nutt’s brave new world, we will all simply ingest some colourless, odourless, flavourless chemical produced in sterile laboratories.
And though we might be open to the idea of a problem-free alcohol drug, the fact is that in nature there is no such thing as a free lunch — or a consequence-free drinking session.
Science shows you can’t separate the pleasure of being drunk from the long-term damage that being inebriated can cause to your brain.
If Nutt’s ‘healthy alcohol’ really works in a similar manner to conventional alcohol, ultimately it will affect the brain in the same ways — thus causing many of the same kinds of social and physical harm.
Perhaps most alarmingly, without a hangover, people won’t even realise what sort of damage they’re doing.
Without the threat of a hangover, the temptation will be to keep going
Messing around with our mental chemistry is a notoriously inexact science. The human brain is, after all, the most complex biological entity in the known universe.
Sousing it with chemicals opens myriad pathways to dangerous unintended consequences, in the short and long term.
Only recently have scientists fully unravelled the way in which alcohol affects us.
Studies by the University of Chicago Medical Centre show how the drug hits the brain like a sophisticated military task force, knocking out its defences, as well as causing civil disorder and chaos.
Alcohol affects brain chemistry by altering levels of neuro-transmitters. These are the chemical messengers that transmit the signals that control thought processes, behaviour and emotion.
Alcohol either increases their activity or dampens it, depending on which areas are affected. The Gaba calming system, for example, is affected in numerous ways.
As well as making us feel more relaxed under the influence of booze, it also makes us sluggish and slurred.
Our inhibitions also get turned down. We become more talkative, more self-confident. This disinhibition, plus the pleasure effects, means that the brain encourages us to have another glass — and then another, and another.
Experienced drinkers know this is the point to stop — having suffered the horrors of previous hangovers.
Professor Nutt was sacked from his post as the Government¿s chief drugs adviser in 2009 for declaring that cannabis, Ecstasy and LSD are less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes
As Kingsley Amis, the famously bibulous novelist, wrote in his book On Drink: ‘Guilt and shame are prominent constituents of the hangover.’
But without the threat of a hangover, the temptation will be to keep going. There is another important factor to consider.
The drunken brain also shuts down its limbic system, which controls our emotions and memory. Emotions — as we all know — become exaggerated, often with disastrous consequences.
This is one of the primary reasons why alcohol-related problems cost the NHS £3.5 billion a year.
Most of this money is used to treat the indirect harm caused by alcohol-induced recklessness.
A study for NHS North West has shown that half of all violent assaults are related to alcohol, more than half of rapists drink alcohol prior to committing their attacks, and more than a fifth of accidental deaths are alcohol-related.
We also know that the brain compensates for the regular presence of alcohol by altering its production of neuro-transmitters.
If the drinking stops, physical and mental withdrawal symptoms — even the notorious DTs (delirium tremens — Latin for ‘shaking frenzy’) — can ensue. And the brain tends to develop a tolerance to pleasure-inducing drugs. People need to take ever more of them to achieve the same effect.
With Professor Nutt’s ‘healthy alcohol’, there is a possibility that people may simply never take the antidote, but keep taking further doses instead.
The fact is that any substance or activity that fires up the brain’s pleasure centres can become addictive.
There are other psychological dangers, too. Constant use of pleasure-inducing drugs is also associated with the development of mental illness.
As we have seen with the rise in use of super-strength cannabis, being habitually heavily intoxicated can seriously alter the way in which young people behave.
However, Professor Nutt is determined to press ahead with his experiments.
As he writes in his blog: ‘I have identified five such compounds and need to test them to see if people find the effects as pleasurable as alcohol . . . All that is needed now is funding to test and put them on the market.’
It seems doubtful that his ‘healthy alcohol’ will contain any compounds that induce a sense of personal or social responsibility.
Nor can his lab experiments properly investigate his invention’s potential for long-term and widespread damage.
Budgetary constraints on his work mean the tests will almost inevitably be too small-scale and short-term to explore the possible dangers fully.
Moreover, this laboratory-made alcohol might work perfectly well on someone as drug-literate as Professor Nutt, but he is surely not representative of the most vulnerable people in our society.
We need to consider carefully whether we really want ‘healthy alcohol’ to be made widely available, or whether it would create a hangover that might last for generations.
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