The Dangerous Professor
LONDON—David Nutt is trying to develop a new recreational drug that he hopes will be taken up by millions of people around the world. No, the 62-year-old scientist isn't "breaking bad." In fact, he hopes to do good. His drug would be a substitute for alcohol, to create drinks that are just as intoxicating as beer or whiskey but less toxic. And it would come with an antidote to reverse its effects, allowing people to sober up instantly and drive home safely.
Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and a former top adviser to the British government on drug policy, says he has already identified a couple of candidates, which he is eager to develop further. "We know people like alcohol, they like the relaxation, they like the sense of inebriation," Nutt says. "Why don't we just allow them to do it with a drug that isn't going to rot their liver or their heart?"
But when he presented the idea on a BBC radio program late last year and made an appeal for funding, many were appalled. A charity working on alcohol issues criticized him for "swapping potentially one addictive substance for another"; a commentator called the broadcast "outrageous." News-papers likened his synthetic drug to soma, the intoxicating compound in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World. Some of his colleagues dismissed the idea as scientifically unfeasible.
Nutt wasn't surprised. As a fierce advocate of what he says are more enlightened, rational drug policies, he has been a lightning rod for a long time. Politicians, in Nutt's view, make irrational decisions about drugs that help them win votes but cost society dearly. Drug policy is often based on the moral judgment that people should not use drugs, he says. Instead, it should reflect what science knows about the harms of different drugs—notably that many are far less harmful than legal substances such as alcohol, he says. The plan for a synthetic alcohol alternative is his own attempt to reduce the damage that drug use can wreak; he believes it could save millions of lives and billions of dollars.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6170/478.full
Suppose that a drug could be developed which caused no permanent physiological change, but which would provide about 6 hours of a psychological feeling of well-being, relaxation, and happiness after it was taken. Suppose also, that the drug was relatively inexpensive to synthesize, perhaps $1 / 6 hour dose.
Should such a drug be made available over-the-counter at drugstores?
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