Imagine you’re out at the bar having some drinks with your friends and nobody has committed to being the designated driver. What do you do when it’s time to go home? You call a cab of course, because that’s the only responsible option, right? Well imagine the same scenario where you can just take a pill and minutes later you’re sober as a bird. Though the technology hasn’t come quite that far yet, scientists in California are getting very close to making this convenience a reality. UCLA professor Yunfeng Lu and USC professor Cheng Ji recently led an experiment that successfully sobered up drunk lab mice by injecting them with a formula comprised of two combined enzymes. The mice became sober significantly faster than the control group of drunk mice and there were no observable negative side effects. Professor Yunfeng Lu says that once the pill form can be synthesized, it would be like having millions of liver cells introduced to the stomach, successfully breaking down and neutralizing all of the alcohol particles.
So if this seemingly too good to be true drug hits the market, what effects will it have on society? Well for one, if the drug is affordable and convenient to use, the instances of drunk driving will significantly diminish. This is because after all, though the people who choose to drive drunk are not the most responsible people, if the option to sober up instantly before getting behind the wheel is there, they will almost definitely elect to take it. The instances of alcohol poisoning leading to death will also drop significantly. Rather than a stomach pump being a necessity, the person in trouble could just have the pill administered by a friend and the enzymes would go to work. And if the pill could be dissolved, it could possibly even be sneakily put into the drink of a too-drunk friend to save them for making some very bad decisions.