It helps if you’re hungry, but that’s about it. Once the alcohol has entered your bloodstream, you’re drunk. Eating before or white drinking will help. Afterwards, it’s just a matter of time until the alcohol leaves your system.
That, of course, being “while” rather than “white.”
sj_blakely, that study doesn’t show that it’s psychosomatic any more than the thousands of other things that seem suceptible to the placebo effect.
But at least it brings to mind one of my favorite Simpson’s lines… Miss Hoover returns to class after being out with Lyme’s Disease.
Miss Hoover: It turns out I didn’t have Lyme’s disease at all, it was just psychosomatic.
Ralph: Does that mean you’re crazy or a liar?
Miss Hoover: A little bit of both Ralph.
Certainly there is some aspect of a “contact high” in drinking. And that could vanish instantly.
And, in theory, anything that speeds up your metabolism will also speed up the rate at which you metabolise alcohol. But- I don’t think that even 3 double expressos will make a significant difference, let alone sober up instantly.
Another problem with that study, si_blakely, is that no-one actually drank any alcohol.
This doesn’t really address the question of whether anything will help someone who has actually consumed alcohol, to sober up quickly.
I’ve been in situations where I stopped enjoying being buzzed due to something going wrong or what have you. Even something rather drastic like witnessing a bar fight in which a person was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head with a pool ball. (This person died later but we of course didn’t know that was the outcome at the time.)
But I don’t think that I actually stopped being drunk or that adrenaline somehow caused the alcohol to metabolize instantaneously or even more quickly.
Even so, I agree that subjectively, you can certainly feel sober when, well, sobering things happen.
I knew a guy who claimed the following:
That he could sober up for a while at will.
He then demonstrated this during an alcohol study at the college I attended (and I later took a course with the professor who did this study and published a number of alcohol experiments).
At will, he could drop his blood alcohol level to less than half as measured by breath analysis. He would then say, “okay, I’ll let it go back up” and his blood alcohol level would rise. He did this anytime the experimenter asked. His case was so unusual that she (the researcher) couldn’t include him in the study, and no, I have no cite for this anecdote, nor was I there to witness it first-hand. However, I have no reason to believe that he was lying to me about, except that I have never heard of it before, nor do I know of a mechanism that would make it possible. If it is possible, it is certainly unusual and probably takes a lot of practice. 
Hmm, good enough for me then…:dubious:
Oh for pete’s sake…
What a crock.
Now, having been a career drunk 24/7, I can tell you that there are people out there who didn’t know when I was drunk. I was able to function quite well a lot of the time, but that does NOT mean I was sober. It meant that I had a lot of practice doing things while drunk.
There is a world of difference.
How could you be so dismissive about this?
:dubious: :dubious:
“You have never lied to me, yet I no longer believe you, That is what has disturbed me” -Neitzsche
Opening the front door at three in the morning and seeing my wife sitting in a chair in the dark usually works for me!
What are the drugs they give you in rapid detox, and do they only work on narcotics, and are there analogs for alcohol? Just wondering.
Well, it sounds like a “crock” to me also. Blood alcohol content don’t go up and down at will.
Lots of people out there are drunk and no one notices; mostly becuase most people are rather self-absorbed, and also because if you drink long enough you get really good at functioning drunk.
That way you get to keep drinking.
There is a way to sober up quickly, but it does involve a oxygen fed catherter inserted into an oriface. Check out New Scientist.
Some years ago I asked my Dr. how he was able to party all night on his golf day and be able to function well enough to perform emergency surgery in the middle of the night. His reply was just one word. "
Oxygen"
I will second the therapeutic effects of oxygen for a hangover at least. IANAD, but it made me feel better. I have no idea if it really helps metabolize alcohol any quicker. I am curious, though…
Well, that’s really interesting. This same professor told us (I was in a class in psychopharmacology at the time) that her studies revealed something that she would not publish because it was controversial and ethically troublesome. She is deceased now, though her findings are no less controversial today…
She found an effect called “state-dependent learning” in humans who’ve consumed alcohol. This effect is well known in rats – if a rat is given a drug (certain drugs, not all) and learns to run a maze under the influence, then it will perform better under the influence than when not under the influence. In other words, the learning is remembered only when the animal is in the same state as when the task was originally learned.
What this means, possibly, is that if you learn a task (say, oh, operating heavy machinery) while intoxicated, that you will not perform the task as well when sober. You gain access to your learned skills only when intoxicated again. That is state-dependent learning. You can acquire motor and cognitive skills if you have enough practice under the influence.
You can see why she chose not to publish this stuff. She didn’t quantify if people could learn enough to drink and drive, for example (I expect that the physical impairment of drinking makes driving under the influence always a dangerous proposition). If everyone knew the concept, then people would drive drunk, and think that because they’ve done it before it’s safe to do, when it is not. After all, people’s judgement about everything becomes impaired including their self-appraisal about skill. They think they can drive well, but they aren’t really aware of how impaired they are.
I don’t know about sobering you up, but when I was in the military, we dealt with LOX (Liquid Oxygen) all the time. When we would go to work early in the mornings with bad hangovers from the night before, we would just inhale the pure oxygen for about 5 mins and the hang over would be completely gone.
I don’t know how long ago this happened to you, but it’s not really new news. At least, I’ve heard it from more than one professor and lots of my friends.
Peace,
~mixie
Too bad there’s nothing like this stuff for alcohol.
Naloxone (Narcan) is a competitive opiate antagonist. Basically, it reverses the effects of an opiate high. Is that what you’re thinking of?
Flumazenil (Romazicon) does the same thing but to benzodiazepines.
Chronic alchoholics sometimes get IV thiamine, however, that’s to help there metabolism. There aren’t any drugs I know of that work in a similar fashion to Narcan. Probably, because alcohol intoxication is from the byproducts of alcohol metabolism in the blood stream, while opiates and benzodiazepines bind to specific receptors in the nervous system.