The average person metabolizes alcohol at the rate of about one drink per hour. Only time will sober a person up. Drinking strong coffee, exercising or taking a cold shower will not help but according to “Fox and Friends “there is a new alcohol-busting pill in the works that promises to be able to sober you up in just a matter of seconds, regardless of how much you drank.
This breakthrough would be considered an alcohol antidote and would be delivered in the form of a pill or capsule. This new course of drugs has not yet left the lab and is not ready to be tested on humans quite yet.
The drug would work by mocking the enzymes in the liver. The liver is responsible for the breakdown of alcohol, which usually takes hours to occur. However, this immediate solution would make someone that is drunk sober in a matter of seconds.
It was a group of researchers that created this as they developed a mix of alcohol metabolizing enzymes. In mice the work has been promising to say the least. It reduces the blood alcohol levels in mice very swiftly and shows much promise for humans down the line.
“The medication would be like having millions of liver cells in your stomach that break down the alcohol, like your liver does, but only much quicker, says Professor Lu. University of Southern California researchers, Yunfeng Lu and Cheng Jifrom, injected intoxicated mice with Nano capsules containing two enzymes.
Oxidase is one of the enzymes; however it creates the by-product of hydrogen peroxide, which can be dangerous. The other enzyme works at decomposing the hydrogen peroxide, so together, these two enzymes aren’t unsafe.
Imagine the possibilities. When out drinking all night there would be a pill that could sober you up before you get behind the wheel. Think of the reduction in drunken driving accidents and DUI’s. That’s essentially what these two professors are trying to do.
Adults drank too much and got behind the wheel about 112 million times in 2010 which is almost 300,000 incidents of drinking and driving each day. Every day in America, another 27 people die as a result of drunken driving crashes. Drunk driving costs the United States $132 billion a year. Just imagine the possibilities.
