A drink that gets you drunk without the hangover? It’s a pre-Christmas miracle!

That was the gist of headlines today, reacting to the news that former government drugs tsar Professor David Nutt has developed compounds that could lead to a “safer version of alcohol”.

The Nutt drink (probably not its working title) would act as an “alcohol surrogate” – possibly in the form of a cocktail – that would induce similar relaxing effects to alcohol but without the aggressiveness, addictiveness, or kidney damage.

Perhaps most startling is the professor’s claim that, after sampling one potential compound, he took an “antidote” that sobered him up enough within an hour to give a lecture.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction – as one commenter pointed out, it resembles a scene from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in which a sozzled Ford Prefect is shoved into a high-tech cubicle that promptly erases his inebriation.

Unsurprisingly, the professor’s compound (not a word always associated with a desirable product) has attracted a great deal of excitement. “It is the stuff dreams are made of,” ran one Tweet. “Science is officially over after reaching its ultimate goal of hangover-free alcohol,” added The Daily Mash.

The news also sparked much hand-wringing over whether the world is ready for a hangover-free drink. A good drinking session must come with the attendant guilt and pain the next day, so the theory goes; it suits a moralistic, no pleasure-without-pain outlook. Hangover-free booze also raises the spectre of uninhibited binge drinking – after all, if it can’t hurt you and you have an antidote that lets you drive home at the end of the night, what’s to stop you indulging?

Before we get carried away, however, Professor Nutt strikes a cautionary note: the alcohol industry is “interested” he says, “but do not need to engage until this new invention becomes a threat to their sales”. “This is a similar situation to that of the tobacco companies when e-cigarettes were being developed,” he adds.

So, does the booze industry need to worry about a synthetic alcohol? Beer writer Pete Brown isn’t convinced. “Alcohol adds body and warmth, mouthfeel and texture,” he told me. “And the process by which it links into the other ingredients is very complex. Taking alcohol out and adding a synthetic drug that mimics some of the brain effects of alcohol might be interesting to people just looking to get drunk, but I think there are far fewer of those people around than Prof Nutt seems to think. I simply can’t imagine his ‘cocktail’ ever achieving the subtlety and mystery of a fine Bordeaux or barley wine.”

‘Synthehol’, then, may well fail the consumer taste test. Moreover, the alcohol industry has time on its side: Prof Nutt is still looking for volunteers to test his invention. But booze brands may want to a keep an eye on developments all the same – they wouldn’t want hangover-free booze to cause them a headache down the line.

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