Loads for my baby and several for the road

Stop the press, Christmas is nearly over and the pre-holiday-season drink-drive campaign warnings have been finessed by a strange newspaper article claiming a new alcohol subsitute is being developed that mimics the feeling of happy inebriation without causing hangovers. An antidote pill can also be taken that reverses the drunken effects instantly so that people can drive home from pubs, parties and the like.

So, what the downside. This medical breakthrough is based on Valium. Doh! We have just spent nearly fifty years breaking society's addictive dependence on benzodiazepines like Valium. When these drugs first appeared on prescription they were trumpeted as a kind of wonder drug, in the same category as Thalidomide and Prozac. And look where those medicines got us as a nation.

Also, with medical breakthroughs of this type, the human-nature factor is never taken into account:

• People are going to abuse this new drug, witness the UK's binge response to 24-hour drinking culture.
• Can you overdose on the new drug? How would people know the composition of what they were drinking?
• What if the antidote pill doesn't work with large intakes of the new drink?
• Will the new drug make users drowsy?
• What's to stop informal 'designer-drug chemists' playing around with the molecular structure of the new drug to creative something narcotic and potential lethal?
• What's the legal position where car crashes occur after people have been advised it is safe to drive after drinking the new brews, especially where drinks have been spiked as a prank?
• What happens to existing drink-drive campaigns where alcohol continues to be drunk? Would driver reaction times not be affected by people consuming the new drug?

In short, social policy on responsible driving would be a mess. Companies manufacturing alcoholic drinks will lobby hard to strangle the product at birth. MPs who indulge in a tipple won't pass the necessary legislation. And, even if the new drink does exactly what it said on the can, would it be in society's best interest to encourage a product whose sole function was to render its customers drunk, however temporarily. This new drink would be a Trojan horse rather than a gift one.

PS: The Daily Telegraph's scoop is not exactly straight off the press, it's been recycled from the Daily Record story of 16 November 2009. The Torygraph has simply been storing the piece up for consumption during the post-Christmas hangover. Professor David Nutt was been sacked as a Government drug adviser before the article appeared: the alcohol-substitute drug seems to be one of Professor Nutt's day-job projects at Imperial College, London.