A friend of mine told me long ago that a Mickey Finn was a drink which contained a substance which would prevent one from metabolising the alcohol in the drink, meaning the drinker would remain inebriated much longer than normal, and presumably throughout the course of a few drinks, become quickly ‘rat-arsed’.
Cecil seems only to mention sedatives and laxatives - has anyone heard of this alternative? Are there even such chemicals which prevent the digestion of alcohol?
I read in one of the Darwin Awards books that a certain type of mushroom inhibits the pathway that metabolizes alcohol, so that tiny amounts of alcohol, “like a chocolate cordial,” result in big-time drunkenness, “and a glass of wine can kill.” The book mentions that this is similar to how the drug Antabuse (disulfiram) works, but I assume that the mushroom toxins block the metabolism of alcohol completely, while Antabuse blocks it at the acetaldehyde stage, resulting in an extremely unpleasant situation where you’ve got a bunch of acetaldehyde in your blood. I could be wrong about this; maybe the mushrooms work exactly the same and are just as unpleasant.
In any case, maybe a bartender could grind up some of these mushrooms and mix a bit of the resulting powder in with a drink.
A Mickey Finn is chloryl hydrate, a powerful sedative.
As Cecil’s original article, “What’s in a Mickey Finn?” explains, the story is a good deal more complicated than that.
Yes, the chloral hydrate answer is the faster-working Mickey that Cecil mentioned. However, the style mentioned in the OP sounds more like phenobarbitol (a tranquilizer/sleeping pill that isn’t used much anymore.) Phenobarb inhibits the body’s oxidation of alcohol, which is one of the things that makes it hazardous. If, on phenobarbitol, you drank 4 drinks over 4 hours, your body wouldn’t burn it off, so you’d be just as impaired as if you had slugged down 4 drinks in ten minutes. You can even reach a fatal level of alcohol intoxication, so mixing the two can be very risky.