You know how the morning after a booze bender you feel the wrath of all those drinks you chugged? And it makes you wonder how something as fun as alcohol can make you feel so, so shitty? Yeah, hangovers suck.
But what if I told you that in about 30 years, hangovers might cease to exist, and you can drink until you’re shitfaced and have a ton of fun, all without wanting to die in the morning? Amazing! Thanks to psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist Dr. David Nutt, it might actually happen in the near-ish future.
Dr. Nutt is a firm believer in “alcosynth,” which is synthetic alcohol that apparently has no morning-after consequences, like headaches, dizziness, and puking in the shower. Alcosynths also solve other problems that come with drinking, including nausea, vomiting, aggression, balance problems, weight gain, and addiction.
And guess what else? Unlike normal alcohol, you can’t drink yourself into oblivion or a coma with alcosynths, because the effects plateau. So, if your limit is 6 drinks with normal booze, you won’t even have a limit with alcosynths, and you can drink all the drinks!
Well, I’ll be damned. That sounds too good to be true. Drinking as much as you want without getting too drunk, nauseous, fat, or violent? Sign. me. up.
Nutt believes alcosynths can be used to make any kind of alcohol you can think of, including gin, rum, and bourbon. Maybe moonshine, too. Or Four Loko.
But, as great as this new-age booze sounds, it’s good to meet it with some (or a lot of) skepticism. We know from certain laws of existence that everything has consequences, especially substances that alter your consciousness.
Dr. George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told The Daily Beast that he doesn’t know of “any drugs that don’t produce an opposite effect later on; Whenever the brain sees a drug that changes something, the brain reacts to that. There’s no free ride in the brain.”
“A hangover is like a mini withdrawal syndrome,” Koob says. Being able to take any drug whatsoever, including alcosynth, with “no afterburn or reaction to that perturbation seems unlikely.”
That said, there will be side effects of alcosynth. But what they are, we don’t know at the moment. But if alcosynth actually does hit the shelves by 2050 as Nutt predicts, we will surely find out.
H/T: Science of Us