The new substance could have the added bonus of being "switched off" instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.
But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.
Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.
The new alcohol is being developed by a team at Imperial College London, led by Professor David Nutt, Britain's top drugs expert who was recently sacked as a government adviser for his comments about cannabis and ecstasy.
He envisions a world in which people could drink without getting drunk, he said.
No matter how many glasses they had, they would remain in that pleasant state of mild inebriation and at the end of an evening out, revellers could pop a sober-up pill that would let them drive home.
Prof Nutt and his team are concentrating their efforts on benzodiazepines, of which diazepam, the chief ingredient of Valium is one.
Thousands of candidate benzos are already known to science. He said it is just a matter of identifying the closest match and then, if necessary, tailoring it to fit society’s needs.
Ideally, like alcohol, it should be tasteless and colourless, leaving those characteristics to the drink it’s in.
Eventually it would be used to replace the alcohol content in beer, wine and spirits and the recovered ethanol (the chemical name for alcohol) could be sold as fuel.
"This is supposed to be a happy occasion... Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-- The King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"Nothing of consequence happened today. " -- Diary of King George III, July 4, 1776
"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
-- Chuck Sonnenburg on Voyager's "Elogium"
I see a very large problem with this whole concept. Alcohol is not something made in a lab that you add to your drinks after they are made. You can't just replace the alcohol in beer or a spirit with something else. It's something that naturally occurs within the drink as a product of fermentation during the production process. You can't physically create a proper beer or wine or what ever that has no alcohol in it and than poor this stuff in. It does not work that way.
It has become clear to me in the previous days that any attempts at reconciliation and explanation with the community here has failed. I have tried my best. I really have. I pored my heart out trying. But it was all for nothing.
You win. There, I have said it.
Now there is only one thing left to do. Let us see if I can sum up the strength needed to end things once and for all.
Purple they make non-alcoholic beers and wines by fermenting them in the time honoured tradition then extracting the ethanol.
What this professor is proposing is to then add his magic ingredient in it's place, the extracted ethanol can then be used as fuel as is clearly stated in the article.
Not sure how he thinks he's going to be able to use benzodiazepines though seeing as they are the principle ingredient in the legal highs sold in the UK and the corporate whores in Westminster keep banning each new batch just as fast as they can force the legislation through the system.
So I stare wistfully at the Lightning for a couple of minutes. Two missiles, sharply raked razor-thin wings, a huge, pregnant belly full of fuel, and the two screamingly powerful engines that once rammed it from a cold start to a thousand miles per hour in under a minute. Life would be so much easier if our adverseries could be dealt with by supersonic death on wings - but alas, Human resources aren't so easily defeated.
I just have my doubts that it will actually be possible to create something that works as described. I see three realistic scenarios, here:
1) They never develop anything even remotely resembling what they are looking for.
2) They are able to develop a synthehol that has some of the capabilities they are looking for, but not all. So they make something that vaguely resembles alcohol when consumed, but has slightly different effects on the brain, but the pill doesn't work as advertise. Or maybe the pill works, but the feeling of drinking it is different enough from normal alcohol that it can't act as directly as a substitute as they imagine.
3) They DO create synthehol that works as advertised. However, (much like the synthetic marijuana strains that were so popular a few years back) they end up having other, unforeseen negative side-effects that end up either marginalizing the market for it or resulting in them becoming banned in their own right (much like synthetic marijuana was).
Just based on the way alcohol effects the body, how wildly varying those effects can be from person-to-person, and the way those effects connect to basic metabolic pathways, I just honestly don't see how it would be biologically feasible to create something that literally works that way. Alcohol just in and of itself can be massively unpredictable; and the effects of mixing alcohol with god-damned benzodiazepines are even MORE unpredictable. Never mind all of the weird interactions benzodiazepine can have with other medications people may be on. There is a reason that people that are prescribed diazepam and similar medications are told DON'T FUCKING DRINK WHILE YOU ARE TAKING THESE.
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
