Enjoy Alcohol, Without the Hangover
What if you could indulge in your favorite cocktails with no hangover or other ill effects? That’s one of the goals for researchers working to make one of the world’s oldest vices less harmful. Some are developing hormone shots to help people sober up quickly. Others are working on alcohol substitutes that target receptors in the brain that affect happiness, while dodging those that make imbibers slur and weave.
“Alcohol is like playing the piano with boxing gloves on. You hit too many keys," says David Orren, managing director of GABA Labs. The London-based company is developing a synthetic alcohol that it says will bring pleasurable effects without hangovers, health problems or slurred speech.
Its basis is gamma-aminobutyric acid, an amino acid that targets receptors in the front of the brain that trigger the relaxation and sociability alcohol brings, while avoiding the chaos it wreaks on the body. Dr. David Nutt, the chief scientific officer of GABA Labs, says his interest in alcohol and GABA receptors first began nearly 40 years ago when his research led him to discover the interaction between the two.
A psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist, he spent two years as chief of section of clinical science in the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health and has long argued in scientific papers that alcohol causes more harm to society than other drugs. GABA receptors are the first contact for alcohol in the brain, opening up and relaxing people, Nutt says. But alcohol then also floods the brain with other neurotransmitters that can cause nasty aftereffects.
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