Alcohol without the hangover?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What he does want to do, however is to get the government into a knot with regard to its drugs policy. Nutt has always been for a drugs policy based solely on the harm that a drug would do. He wants drug policy to be stringently evidence-based.
So he starts talking about a drug with zero harmful side effects but with the enjoyable effects. He wants to try and goad ministers into talking about whether such a drug would be banned or allowed. So far the media hasn't really taken the bit between the teeth, however.
That's the closest thing to an accidental Onion headline I've seen in a while.
For a moment, I thought he'd made synthonol (that's one for Star Trek fans), but your explanation makes much more sense.
Here's the background:
UK drugs law places drugs on 3 levels of illegality.
Class 1 (e.g. heroin): very illegal. Strict punishments for possession.
Class 2 (e.g. marijuana): illegal. If you're caught with a small quantity, you'll probably be let off with just a caution.
Class 3 (e.g. body-building steroids): illegal to sell. Legal to possess in small quantities.
The law requires the Secretary of State, under the advisement of a panel of experts, to classify drugs according to the level of harm they cause. David Nutt was on that panel.
The panel advised, among other things, that marijuana should be moved to Class 3. And, for a time, that was what happened. It was actually legal to smoke marijuana in the UK. Then the government changed its mind, and moved marijuana back to Class 2. The panel resigned in protest. David Nutt complained especially loudly, and started comparing the risks of MDMA to horse-riding and so on.
Apologies for any errors. This is just from memory.
There's also soma from Brave New World. Not sure if Aldous Huxley was the first to write about the idea, but it's hard to argue that he wasn't the first to bring it up well.
The police do have a system of "cannabis warnings" over here which treats being caught along the lines of an official "don't do this again" unless you're either a child, keep being caught, or the circumstances warrant a straight up arrest.
Synthehol. Synthetic alcohol.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Synthehol
(Not nearly as interesting to engineers as the real stuff, which is apparently at its best when it's green.)
The Guardian article this was scavenged from is very light on details too.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/11/alcohol...
It looks to be a GABA agonist, which as HarryHirsch points out, are hardly pharmaceuticals with a history of low risk ...
GHB[0], diazepam (benzo), phenobarbitol (barbiturate)....
GHB is in some sense safer than people think it is (the trouble is that overdoses are difficult to treat when they happen), but otherwise I'd agree - alcohol is in many ways one of the most dangerous drugs known to man, but sometimes it's better to stick to the devil you know.
[0] Common club drug, as well as a common date rape drug
GHB is used for that far less frequently than many people seem to think. The common date rape drug seems to be alcohol itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape_drug#Frequency_of_occ...
This realization is important because it changes what sort of caution should be used with drinks in clubs. First and foremost, it is important to have a strong grasp on how much ethanol your drinks have in them. Letting somebody order you an unfamiliar cocktail might not be a good idea if you don't have a solid grasp on how that extra drink will affect you (whereas conventional wisdom about date rape drugs might have you believe that accepting a random cocktail straight from the bartender is perfectly safe).
GHB is most often used recreationally (intentionally); I only mention it as a "date rape" drug because that's the context in which people are more likely to be familiar with the name.
I wholeheartedly agree, though - alcohol is the most insidious date rape drug around.
This is very, very sound advice!
I have a somewhat unusually high tolerance to alcohol, which means that by the time everyone around me is drunk as fuck, I'm just getting worked up, and I'm no fun at drinking contests. As a consequence, I have witnessed an unspeakable number of people leaving with people they just met (or worse, driving) when they were drunk beyond belief. Having a history of alcohol intake myself, I know perfectly well that you can be quite sure you're in perfect share when you're barely dragging your feet.
GHB may be fancy and slick, but I have often seen people who were so drunk that it wouldn't have had any obvious, immediate effect.
Obligatory disclaimer: my heavy alcohol intake coincided with a period when I suffered from, and actually sought treatment for depression. I never slipped into alcoholism, but drank heavily. I still drink, and still more than your average Joe, but when I feel I get dizzy, I switch to soda. "Stay away from the booze!" is not something I'd advocate, but being careful with the booze is an advice I give wholeheartedly and out of quite some sorrow experience. Your liver may well survive the intake, but your brain and your soul are a lot more fragile than they seem.
GHB is new and unfamiliar, so it gets the worse rap, but alcohol has pretty much everything an date rape drug would have: It induces a loss of inhibition, a loss of motor control, a loss of language skills, and loss of consciousness with retrograde amnesia[0]. It also has one very important factor working in its favor: Social acceptance. Nobody gives it a second glance.
[0] Retrograde amnesia is a loss of memories formed before the event; in this case, the event is the point at which the person loses consciousness entirely.
On the other hand, there's some interesting work on molecules that decrease dependence/tolerance.For example there's work on reducing morphine abuse potential using calcium/magnesium in rats[4].There's also conflicting research results regarding the effect of magnesium, glycine and zinc on the effect alcohol has on the NMDA receptor(which is supposed to be the main cause of tolerance)[5].
So maybe there's a combination that gives most of the benefits of alcohol , with a small dependence potential. Let's not get discouraged from this noble goal yet.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretazenil
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagoclone
[3]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Ago...
Like many drugs, they put you at risk for impaired driving, disinhibited behavior, etc. People use them on the street and they can certainly come in with benzodiazepine withdrawal, which looks pretty much like alcohol withdrawal (both of which can be life-threatening, unlike most other types of withdrawal).
There is little reason to think that a new GABAergic compound would be "safe" by any stretch of the imagination. The proof will have to come in the form of clinical trials.
Although my comment might seem like I am against the drug, I am all for it. Especially from a business perspective.
Does this drug have unknown side effects that outweigh the visible benefits? Only time and extensive testing will tell. Alcohol's already been through that gauntlet.
Of course, as with the parents comment, I'd love to see this work. Just don't assume that it's "safe" because we've shown it doesn't have X number of adverse effects we specifically looked for, within a limited timeframe.
My guess is that people will be able to find old or new ways to abuse or become addicted.
The idea of an antidote or antagonist is initially appealing, but we may see the pattern that made the narcotic antagonist nalaxone (Narcan) subject to abuse - people take a long lunch break, inject a narcotic, enjoy the buzz, and then use the antagonist before returning to work, supposedly no worse for wear.
Would someone who does the benzo-equivalent of a three-martini lunch and then takes the benzo-antagonist be ready to return to coding, planning, or digital networking no worse than they were when they left work?
Will the antagonist really convert someone who is too benzo'd to drive to someone capable of driving as well as their pre-impaired self?
How long will it take for societies to work out those details and differences?
This is something that has great potential, if it could replace ethanol without bad effects of ethanol - but to believe that it might have no bad effects seems naïve.
Sounds amazing, to be honest.
Not to mention, the mere idea that you'd waste money by ending it early would send many users away laughing.
And if you have the money and time/connections to be sourcing Naloxone on a regular basis, why not just use a short-acting opioid like Fentanyl (or even just Heroin?)
In what ways would the 3-martini-equiv benzo + nominal antidote be worse than, say, 3 martini lunch? It seems like the problem is more with irresponsible people consuming drugs for recreation when they shouldn't, rather than the drugs themselves[1].
Giving such irresponsible people the ability to hide either consumption without totally reversing its effects would indeed be a net negative, but same can be argued of breath mints or dark glasses, neither of which are known to make you a better drunk-driver.
Overall, I'd be deeply surprised if there wasn't something objectively better than alcohol in every way, but agreed that it's going to take society a long time and a good number of missteps to accept and adapt to it.
[1] Ignoring for brevity the issues of dependence, addiction and tolerance that might require them to dose regularly, or risk even greater impairment or harm to themselves.
It did save my life, though.
Case-in-point: we're starting to treat heroin dependence with a drug that is just as recreationally potent, and has similar risk of overdose[0], when we could just easily be treating it with heroin itself (diacetylmorphine maintenance[1]).
Currently, buprenorphine is the "right" drug to be addicted to, but even its makers started advertising its high addictive potential (in an attempt to push their new "safer" version, which is still under patent protection and therefore more profitable[2]).
At some point, we can only imagine that Reckitt Benckiser (the makers) will have milked as much as they can out of the drug, and we will declare buprenorphine a "bad" drug to be addicted to, just like heroin, and treat its addiction with the latest shiny, new drug.
We've seen this cycle many, many times. In fact, it's worth mentioning here that the word "heroin" was originally a Bayer trademark[3]. It was a cough suppressant invented as a "safer" over-the-counter substitute for the recreational bogeyman of the time: morphine.
How times change!
(By the way, I recognize that buprenorphine can be very helpful in treatment. this is not to say that buprenorphine is either right or wrong for everyone, just that the laws and policies that we construct around these drugs often represent financial interests more than they represent scientific or medical facts.)
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/health/in-demand-in-clinic...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment
If the drug is really that marvelous and the author has problems with alcohol competitors, he should just open source the preparation procedure.
1. pace yourself (one drink every 45+ minutes) 2. drink water between alcohol drinks.
I usually don't have more than 2-3 drinks when I go out. Even when I was younger, and drank more, following the steps above I only ever had a hangover when I broke those rules.
I don't think the health effects are that much of a concern. The liver is quite capable of dealing with alcohol consumed in moderation, and if you are drinking that much that you are getting worried about the state of your liver you should also worry how you are treating the people around you while continuously under the influence.
Very many people (especially in the UK) do not drink alcohol in moderation. Liver disease and cirrhosis is seen more commonly in young people than it used to be.
> and if you are drinking that much that you are getting worried about the state of your liver you should also worry how you are treating the people around you while continuously under the influence.
This appears to over-estimate the amount of alcohol needed to destroy a liver. A person does not need to be continuously drunk to severely damage their liver. Tolerance to alcohol would probably mean that they are not drunk all the time.
A woman drinking a glass of wine each evening, with an extra glass on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is drinking (10 glasses of wine per week) is drinking something like 26 units a week, assuming a 200 ml serving size and a 13% ABV strength. WHO suggest that women drinking more than 14 units per week are at risk (although this is old advice) and men should drink less than 21 units per week. This woman will not see her drinking as anything extreme, and most people in the UK wouldn't see that as a worrying drinking pattern.
Current recommendations include some alcohol free days to allow the liver to repair itself.
The British problem is more of a social problem of really, really overdoing it on the weekend - Everything2 has a lovely writeup on the "vertical drinking establishment". If you substitute benzos for alcohol you may have less vomiting in the streets, but just as much fighting at chuck-out time.
There seem to be more cases of liver diseases in Britain than in other European nations. Since binge-drinking does not affect the liver quite as much as drinking smaller amounts more often, it seem that these are due to alcoholism. If you substitute benzodiazepines for alcohol, this wouldn't be much of an improvement, instead of a whiny, angry alcoholic whose life revolves around his stash you'd have a whiny angry benzo addict whose life still revolves around their stash. Their liver would be in better shape, though.
(Full disclosure: I have alcoholic family members and am deeply suspicious of quick cures)
Is obesity a factor in greater rates of liver disease?
This report from the British government says that virus hepatitis and alcohol are the biggest risk factors and that a strategy needs to be devised against these to fight chronic liver disease.
You drink American beer? Why?
This article lost me pretty early with these words. Here in British Columbia, Canada, minimum pricing is also in effect. I can tell you full well it does nothing to control consumption and, as with most prohibitions, only increases the amount of social problems. I've looked into the research proving it is effective and haven't managed to find any. I question where the author gets his facts.
Doesn't look that way to me. It just looks like the MHRA has decided to regulate them.
Relevant:
http://www.mhra.gov.uk/home/groups/comms-ic/documents/websit...
Now, complying with regulation for medical devices is very expensive. Their high end estimate for the costs to a company that wanted to import _a_ product into the UK for sale sits at £266,000. A figure I consider to be rather optimistically low. And that assuming that
'57. Our MA cost estimates assume that applicants would not have to conduct expensive animal and post-market-authorisation human clinical trials to satisfy MHRA that the risks to health from long term inhalation of ENDS vapour are acceptable. However, this may not be the case and MHRA assessors might ask for these additional trials. The one-off costs of conducting these additional trials would probably run into several hundreds of thousands of pounds. '
A lot of the strength of the e-cig market is in its diversity, you can get a lot of different flavours, and a lot of different devices to get the experience you want. Which this sort of thing would make very costly. And it's worth noting that the MHRA is fairly blatantly against diversity in flavours, it's even mentioned as one of the things they'd do in options 1.
And all this in a paper that notes:
'The policy might only need to be marginally unsuccessful for it to be considered a costly failure. If the design and implementation of the policy has the effect of reducing access to NCPs (particularly ENDS) then it is possible that the number of successful quit attempts could decline. If there were no substantial countervailing health gains from improvements in safety, the policy’s overall impact could be highly negative.'
If they push this through to the hilt, I rather suspect that we'll end up with just the big companies trading their crappy little fake-cigs.
At this stage it's a matter of seeing how the EU breaks on the issue. With big tobacco attempting to kill off their competitors before they become large enough to defend themselves, BT being one of the few who can afford that sort of thing, I'm not hugely hopeful of that.
I say "good luck". These things are rapidly approaching critical mass, and with tons of availability on the internet, all they're going to do is siphon the economic benefits into other countries.
No commentary at all about the proposed antidote or its possible properties? I suspect the most obvious interesting drug interaction would be the proposed antidote vs something similar yet different like good old fashioned ethanol.
No hangovers.