Half an hour in and the convivial conversation is just that little bit more convivial. My entertaining anecdotes are, I am confident, very much more entertaining.
Pouring me another drink, David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, slaps me on the back and declares that he is slowing down. “I’m beginning to slur a bit,” he says.
Taking a sip I try, and fail, to say “neuropsychopharmacology”.
The night is, in other words, at that perfect point — the point Evelyn Waugh once described when “wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended”. With luck, though, the morning after will not be greeted by what Waugh also described as “melancholy, indigestion and moral decay”.
Because, crucially, no alcohol was involved in this conviviality.
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The half-empty bottle of Sentia in front of us is a paradox. On the front it states, proudly, that it is 0 per cent ABV. On the back it states, in small print, that you should not drink it when pregnant, when on medication or before driving.
Its purpose? To solve the significant problem Nutt has identified with non-alcoholic drinks: they aren’t alcoholic.
“Most people drink alcohol to become more sociable and more relaxed. They want to take away that social inhibition, that anxiety, that slight uncertainty about how people are going to react to you.” A bottle of 0 per cent beer does not do that.
His drink, however, contains ingredients that, Nutt claims, take you to that “two drink” perfection — where you are “disinhibited, more interested in people, but still have your facilities”. The same ingredients will not, though, take you beyond that, or leave you investigating the toilet bowl the next morning.
If you know Nutt, it is probably from his fame as the short-lived government drugs tsar. “Short-lived” because he had a tendency to say things that the government didn’t like its drugs tsars to say. Such as: ecstasy is less dangerous than horse riding, our drugs classification system is utterly illogical and — most unforgivably of all — among the more dangerous of all those drugs is the one government ministers use most widely: alcohol.
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As the ruddy-cheeked form in front of me testifies, Nutt is no puritan. In fact, he has his own theory of humanity — that such is our innate need for alcohol that the agricultural revolution may have been spurred not by bread but by beer. Now though, just as the coal of the industrial revolution has given way to solar, so, he argues, alcohol as a technology needs reform.
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What if we could get the good bits without the bad? What if we could reach that ideal balance of social disinhibition without, say, running the risk of later on exposing ourselves outside a kebab van and then leaving a traffic cone on a lamp post?
Waugh wrote of alcohol as something romantic but difficult, like a love affair. A neuropsychopharmacologist thinks of it differently. Alcohol is — like love, in fact — just brain chemistry. It is molecules locking on to other molecules.
What those first few drinks lock on to, among other things, is a group of neurotransmitters called gaba receptors which calm and relax the brain.
What more drinks do — the sort of drinks that later precipitate kebabs and, much later, melancholy, indigestion and moral decay — is build up in the body and interfere with all sorts of other things.
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Nutt’s idea was simple: target just the gaba, and do so by engineering a molecule that removes itself from the body rapidly and painlessly. By only hitting that one type of receptor, it would avoid some of less desirable effects of alcohol intoxication. By being easily metabolised, it would avoid the less desirable after-effects of that intoxication: a hangover. The result is a substance he calls Alcarelle.
That, though, is not what we are drinking. Convincing regulators to let humans ingest a novel molecule is hard even when it is invented to do something like curing cancer. Harder still when its intention is curing, for instance, dancing embarrassingly at the office party.
Which was why, in parallel, he and his colleagues — who are now extending the range of drinks and opening a new round of investment — developed a drink tailored to the same receptor but using natural ingredients already shown in the scientific literature to act on gaba.
On the ingredients list are a lot of herbs. None are patentable; Nutt won’t tell me which are active ingredients or how.
But do they work? Three Sentias with tonic in and, for me, all the indications are there. My cheeks feel flushed, the conversation feels easier. And — normally a sure sign — I am increasingly certain that I am absolutely fascinating company.
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Equally though, Nutt is a scientist. Here we are in a bar, after work, with a round of drinks that look like alcohol and that we are told simulate alcohol. What better way of engendering a placebo effect? As I leave to catch the train home, as what effects there were are rapidly metabolised out of my system, I know I can’t dismiss the idea that it is all in my mind.
Then I say goodbye to Nutt, turn towards the door, and trip on the table leg.
But the next morning? I feel absolutely fine.
