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Comment by fy20 | Hacker News Reader

It'll just push the alcohol industry to invent synthehol.

I saw a post by a guy getting his masters in chemistry who mentioned two or three drugs that each mimicked part of the effects of alcohol. Week later he took the post down.

There are plenty of well known drugs, some illegal without a prescription some illegal entirely, which mimic parts of alcohol's effects. For example GHB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Hydroxybutyric_acid

There are also attempts to specifically create drugs that will be identical to alcohol but without the negatives. Whether that will ever come to fruition, and be legal, I don't know. For example https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/a30117412/alcohol-ha...

GHB huh, yeah just try Gabapentin, start with 1.2 grams and adjust as needed. The effects take an hour or so to start showing, but they're pretty much the good effects of alcohol (relaxation, disinhibition, feeling good, sociable) with few of the bad ones (somewhat stupefying and the hangover).

Tolerance builds up fast, a couple of weeks at most for daily use, then you have to taper down or risk dealing with terrifying withdrawals (insomnia, vivid nightmares, anxiety), which are (somewhat ironically) diminished/eliminated by using alcohol.

Just to be clear, I wasn't recommending GHB as something people should try over alcohol :) It was just the first drug name that came to mind that has some similar effects and that's quite popular as a recreational drug.

Gabapentin I don't think is nearly as popular, though a couple of years ago I was told that it had become a hugely popular drug in UK prisons for some reason.

Eh, why not? Anything's better than alcohol. Gabapentin is probably popular because it's like alcohol without the negative effects and it's non-addictive. It works as an antidepressant even though not accepted by the healthscam industry.

Low-dose ketamine feels a lot like alcohol too, but feels "cleaner", leaves your system sooner, and doesn't resulting in a hangover.

25mg orally would feel like a mild alcohol buzz, and would last for up to 4 hours.

Around 10mg nasally (either as powder or as a nasal spray) would have a similar effect, but would only last up to 2 hours.

DISCLAIMER: I am not suggesting anyone try this, it's information for educational purposes only!

IIRC, former UK drug-advisor, David Nutt (famed for his common sense approach that was at logger-heads with the UK govs political approach) was working on some kind of synthenol, which was rumoured to be based on GHB, and have an "antidote" so you could remove the effects.

He's the guy interviewed in my second link :)

Very interesting person indeed, though I've met two unrelated people who've worked with him and both had great things to say about his science, not so great things to say about his personality / ego / way of working. But I hope he succeeds in his mission, and I'm already grateful for his speaking truth to power back when he got fired by the government for telling people the actual facts about how dangerous different drugs are.

Haha, I hadn't actually clicked through :)

Yep, Nutt always made a lot of sense to me. I never got the point of having an independent drug advisory committee if the government wasn't going to listen to a single thing it said, lean on them to say what that wanted to hear instead, and indeed make policy completely at odds with the science.

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