One of the creators of "safe alcohol" is David Nutt, head of the neuropharmacology department at Imperial College London. He started this work because he is convinced that alcohol causes more harm to the body than "soft" drugs.
British specialists have been trying to produce "artificial alcohol" for more than 10 years. It is assumed that it will be able to cause in people about the same sensations as usual, but at the same time it will not lead to liver damage, severe hangovers and withdrawal symptoms.
The drink is based not on ethyl alcohol, but on a completely different molecule (or “cocktail” of molecules), but its formula has not been disclosed. It is known that the first experiments were carried out with benzodiazepine derivatives. Back in the 1980s, Nutt was able to show that these substances are good competitors for alcohol for binding GABA receptors and could serve as a remedy for intoxication if they themselves were not very dangerous psychoactive substances, writes Popular Mechanics.