"'I'm an addiction specialist and, for me, 'that means hard drugs" "'- heroin, cocaine.'" "But there's one drug that is just everywhere." "Alcohol." "And it's the one drug that I just don't get." "'Alcohol grips most of us, often before we're even adult, 'and stays right the way through our lives to the end.'" "No other drug does that." "So I want to find out why alcohol has such strong effects." "One, because it's my job and two, because my father was an alcoholic." "'In this film, I'm going to explore 'what science is saying about alcohol, 'by far the most widely-used drug.'" "'What does alcohol do to our brains and bodies?" "'" "Do you like the effects you're feeling now?" "Four.Would you like more of what you've received?" "Five." "'What are the dangers of our children drinking too young?" "Alcohol kills brain cells." "They can bring their blood alcohol levels up so high that they get close to overdose levels." "'How much of our relationship with alcohol is written in our genes?" "'" "It's not like having your blood pressure taken." "'And could this new designer drug really be a safe swap for alcohol?" "'" "I'd have to say that I'd vote for the three pills from Dr Nutt." "'But for me, the most important question is this...'" "Take any dozen people." "Each of them will have their own relationship with alcohol." "West Ham getting promoted." "Going to gigs.Pubs and clubs.St Patrick's Day.Restaurants." "'It will surround them throughout their lives." "Family Christmas meals.Divorce." "Reminiscing at funerals." "Birthday parties, weddings." "Friday night down the pub." "Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday." "'Some of them will find it really hard to stop.'" "I don't think alcohol is a drug." "It's not a drug." "I wouldn't say it's a drug." "'Inject 29mls of pure alcohol and you die.'" "I don't see it as a drug." "No." "That's not how I'd class it." "'So what about me?" "'" "I think a few words are in order about me and alcohol." "And I'm a drinker." "I like alcohol." "And in spite of my father's serious drinking problems," "I like to drink, myself." "And, as an addiction expert, it occurs to me that" "I don't really know that much about this drug." "And maybe I haven't wanted to find out." "'The fact is, I've been drinking ever since I was a teenager." "'And yet, what I've never dared to ask myself 'is what exactly does it do to make me feel the way I do when I drink?" "'I've come to meet a colleague of mine, Professor Nutt, 'to really pin down the pharmacology of this drug, alcohol.'" "What is it about alcohol that we like, as humans?" "Well, alcohol is a remarkable drug, cos it's so many different things." "Many people use different aspects of alcohol to serve their own purposes." "Here's alcohol.You've got some here!" "So this is lab-grade ethanol?" "That's right." "If you have a couple of large-ish glasses of wine, then you'd be drinking about that much." "It works on many different systems in the brain." "The first effect most of us have with alcohol is we get calm." "So, taking a couple of shots of alcohol is like taking a minor tranquilliser, like Diazepam." "The best example is when people are flying." "The first thing they do when the seatbelt sign comes off is serve the drinks, because about 30% of people are phobic of flying." "It relaxes me." "I feel so much more relaxed." "It makes me mellow.Relaxed." "It seems obvious to me that there's also an immediate high, a buzz, a euphoric effect." "Again, depending on the circumstances, a lot of people do get quite energised with alcohol." "There are two different neurotransmitters involved in that." "One is dopamine, which is actually what drugs like cocaine target." "It used to make me buzz." "I feel daring, so it's a good feeling." "Another contribution to the pleasurable effects of alcohol is serotonin." "A drug which increases serotonin, Prozac, is an antidepressant." "Very extrovert." "I was the centre of the party, like." "This is heroin." "Heroin's extremely addictive." "You're not telling me alcohol's like heroin." "No, but at some point, you begin to turn on the same brain systems as heroin." "It makes you feel very excited, like anything's possible." "You think you can take on the world, I think that's what it is." "It's confidence." "One more stage." "And that's the barbiturates." "Now, these are anaesthetics." "High-dose barbiturates, anaesthetics, put people to sleep." "If you take too much of them, you stop breathing and die." "That's why people die of alcohol." "I couldn't remember nothing... er...for the next four or five days." "If you've got bruises and you don't know how you've got them, you've had a good night." "It seems obvious, doesn't it, across the land, at the weekend, people are getting out of control on alcohol." "What's going on?" "How you get off your trolley on alcohol?" "Everything's going on." "The anxiolytic effect is taking away your fear." "The stimulant effect is making you aggressive and irritable." "The serotonin effect is making you feel good, even though you're actually perhaps getting beaten up.Yeah." "And then the anaesthetic effect is taking away that sense of self-awareness which most of us use to prevent ourselves doing silly things." "There is something about alcohol that makes other people more attractive to you and you more attractive them." "It's a combination of the different neurotransmitters." "I tend to declare my love for people." "They say it's associated with sexual feelings, so I think it's true." "I just love him!" "You can get off with people and say, "Sorry, I was drunk!"" "My top comes off." "I have been promiscuous, thanks to alcohol." "I get off with anyone." "I lose my inhibitions." "I wouldn't look at them twice, had I been sober." "Do you think, at the end of the day, there's just nothing else like it?" "Yes." "If you were to take all those..." "That would be me running around, screaming." "It's a unique drug." "There's no question." "'To really understand this unique drug, 'and why it's so ingrained in all our lives, 'first, we have to understand where it comes from.'" "When I think of alcohol, the images that spring to mind are bars, the clatter of glasses, the pouring of liquids." "And alcohol as just a sort of product that we have created." "But that's not true, is it?" "'In fact, you have to go back 80 million years 'to its first and most simple use, a poison.'" "This is a war between different types of bugs, of micro-organisms." "'I've come to a cherry orchard in Kent to meet Dr Quain, 'an expert in microbiology.'" "We're talking about yeast, bacteria, fungi." "What they want is to survive and beat off competitors." "Rotting fruit contains sugars - glucose, fructose - things that bugs want." "But yeast has been pretty damn clever." "What it said was, "I'm gonna take some of that sugar" ""and I'm gonna make something which is a by-product of eating sugar."" "And that by-product is alcohol." "'But the really clever part is that alcohol is poisonous to other bugs.'" "So bad for those other bugs, good for yeast and good for us." "That's right." "Without this particular species of yeast, it would be a teetotal world." "'So at the heart of this war was one tiny organism that evolved a unique method to protect itself.'" "Some juice coming out there, which will help." "Oh, gosh, well, there are a few things on here, but the majority - and there are loads of them - are little ovals." "Those are yeast cells." "It's almost a pure culture, as we would say." "There's little or nothing else there." "What I'm looking at, I suppose, is yeast floating in alcohol?" "Yeah." "Um..." "And if you think about it, going back in time, this might've been how primitive man first encountered alcohol, by eating some rotten fruit." "Do you want to try one?" "Yeah, OK, I will." "Not the one you just used." "This is another ripe one." "Give it a go." "Oh, you're not kidding." "That's quite strong." "Actually, the cherry taste has diminished, but there is a hint of alcohol." "'This quirk of evolution - the ability to turn sugar into alcohol - 'take us way back." "'But it's what we do today, when we harvest billions of yeast cells 'to make their poison for us, 'using a relatively simple piece of chemistry, 'that we have obsessively reproduced across the planet." "'Once we'd tasted alcohol, it seems there was no going back.'" "Like Popeye and spinach." "I would see it as part of a ritual, yes." "Part of my routine." "I'm in a group, everybody's drinking, "Oh, come and join in!"" "If I met a student who didn't drink, I'd be like, "Really?" "!"" "There's a lot of business that gets done over a glass of wine." "'What strikes me about how I and other people drink 'is how much that reveals about us.'" "It seems to me we can chart our lives in relation to alcohol." "And alcohol, in a sense, has a sort of life cycle." "And maybe the reasons that we can think of for drinking changed as we change." "But if you just picked somebody randomly off the street, and said to them, "OK, tell me your drinking...style,"" "you would learn a lot about their life." "'The interesting thing about this relationship 'is that it's not universal." "'But I know from my work with other drugs that very often, 'patterns emerge that define the type of user you are." "'So can each of us be defined as a particular type of drinker?" "'Do we fit into different tribes?" "'The most compelling evidence has come not from humans 'but from some of our nearest relatives." "'In 2004, on the island of St Kitts, 'people noticed monkeys coming in from the surrounding jungle and stealing cocktails." "'Monkeys would've been used to consuming low levels of alcohol 'through eating the local ripe sugar cane." "'But now they are onto the distilled stuff." "'And some of them were getting drunk.'" "'In the Washington Animal Research Centre, 'scientists like Dr Barr were intrigued." "'She wanted to find out if there are behavioural traits 'that both monkeys and humans share once they have drunk alcohol.'" "So, they must really want it, because it's got to be to some extent risky for them to be doing this." "You really have to hold onto your drink!" "You really do have to hold onto your drink." "Look at that!" "That's frenzied drinking, isn't it?" "There can be some competition." "HE LAUGHS" "Back off from the Mai Tai!" "It's a limited resource, I guess." "'What the scientists did was to recreate the drinking opportunities offered to monkeys on the island, 'but in a controlled environment." "'They monitored the monkeys by a collar, so they knew exactly how much was being drunk 'and what different effects it was having.'" "You can see this animal climbing up into this chamber." "But they're all free to choose whether to have alcohol or not." "Exactly." "This male here is repeatedly coming up and wants to drink this alcohol." "Do you see different types of behaviour, once they've had alcohol or not?" "Some animals become relaxed, or appear to become sedate, even clumsy." "Other guys are running around like crazy, playing, doing dangerous things." "They become disinhibited." "They do things you don't typically observe in these monkeys, because they've had this dose of alcohol." "The guy who looks like he's swinging on the lampshade up there, we know which one you've been at, fella!" "'I recognise these different behaviours." "'They obviously apply to us humans too." "'But the interesting thing is how this population divides very clearly into different tribes - 'those that like it, dislike it, or actively avoid it.'" "It's very similar to what you see in human populations." "'It's probably around 25% that don't like it, 50% that like it some of the time and 25% who, if given the chance, they will drink every day that they can." "You would just see a very different reaction." "I think..." "Well, we see it in humans too." "Not everyone responds to alcohol the same way." "I know that there are friends of mine with whom I don't particularly like to drink alcohol!" "And I think that really, the fundamental systems that are altered when you drink alcohol are the same in a monkey and in human." "'There is something really striking about this drug, alcohol." "'Whether monkey or human, it seems to divide us into three distinct tribes.'" "There's one group that really doesn't like alcohol at all." "There's another that appears to like it and will drink reasonably freely." "But yet a third, when given the opportunity would drink and drink and drink." "It leaves me with the slightly uncomfortable question as to which of those latter groups I fall into." "I don't like the taste of alcohol." "Horrid." "It was absolutely horrible." "I don't drink that much." "Two glasses of wine, that's fine." "I will drink, through the night, a bottle of wine." "The weekly unit amounts, you know, probably do in one night." "And the frightening thing is this relationship is beginning earlier and earlier." "About 20 years ago, the average age for a first drink was 16." "Today, it's 13." "My very first drink was possibly at the age of six." "Sneaked one from my mum." "I was about 12, probably." "I drunk it in hiding." "But despite its widespread use by children, it's very difficult to research its effects on the teenage brain." "Ethically no-one can justify giving alcohol to a child." "Only once back in 1984 did scientists conduct a study to directly look at this." "A group of children between 10-15 were brought together for an experiment." "Each of them had an intravenous needle inserted in theirarms so their blood levels could be monitored." "Then a dose of ethanol, pure alcohol, was added to a soft drink and given to them." "Then they had to stand on a vibrating platform, so their steadiness and balance could be was tested." "A computer measured how many times the childmoved and by how much." "Dr Linda Spears was struck by the results of this simple test." "They gave an intoxicating dose of alcohol, or what they thought would be an intoxicating dose of alcohol, to some 10-12-year-old boys." "And they were going to examine them and see how they felt and see how drunk they felt, look at them behaviourally and see if they were staggering." "If they could close their eyes and stand on one foot and all that." "The bottom line is that the boys acted like they weren't given any alcohol at all." "They were not impaired at all." "Even though adults at that dose would've been quite impaired, even adults that have drunk alcohol before and would have some tolerance." "So that made them think that there might be something going on in adolescence that may make them fairly insensitive to at least those kinds of intoxicating effects of alcohol." "You've translated that design into your laboratory?" "Absolutely." "It would be interesting to do that work in children but you can't." "Ethically, you can't be giving alcohol to kids, so one way we've been trying to do that is looking at an animal model - a very simple animal model of adolescence and we used rats." "Linda re-ran the experiment for me." "The idea was to compare teenage with adult rats after they'd had a dose of alcohol and see which one was better at keeping their balance." "So the rats were put upside down on a slope - a spot they would immediately try to get out of, but would they be able to?" "The first on was a teenage rat." "And he made it." "The second teenager seemed to find it even easier." "And the third one" " I wouldn't have known he'd touched a drop." "Then came the adults..." "And this is when it all started to fall apart." "They'd had exactly the same dose as the teenagers, but clearly couldn't hold it." "Maybe the third would be different?" "No." "You'd imagine that there would either be no difference or in fact it would go the other way." "That a young, if you like, a young brain would be more affected." "For these kinds of tasks, we think that, the adolescents are less sensitive because of the brain regions that are responding to those tasks are different in terms of their developmental stage than adults." "So to drink more, to be able to cope with more booze on board, but that's not to say there's no risk of damage." "That's right." "The adolescent brain is a composite of areas that are more sensitive to alcohol and less sensitive to alcohol than adults." "In amongst the things that, the proportions of the brain that seem to be very sensitive to alcohol are regions that are important for learning and memory." "Adolescents are very sensitive to alcohol-induced memory impairments." "I couldn't think of a worse combination - a teenager's memory and learning potential vulnerable to alcohol but the teenager not feeling the effects." "It's almost like you've got to be careful when you see a young person drunk." "They've probably taken more than you imagined.Absolutely." "If you ask parents, there's a big disconnect because if you ask parents are their kids drinking, they report quite a lower number of kids drinking than the kids that are actually drinking." "And part of that is because these kids are coming home and they're not acting, they're not looking intoxicated." "But if a young person comes home after a night out and they are substantially affected, they've drunk a hell of a lot of alcohol." "That's right." "They have drunk a lot." "And the problem is that being less sensitive to these intoxicating effects, they can bring their blood alcohol levels up so high, that they get close to overdose levels." "I've don't think I've ever been to a club sober." "You don't go to a party without alcohol." "Everyone was just downing it." "When you're younger and you're..." "Let's say five and you play with dolls and you pretend, that you're older." "And now when you come to 14 you drink alcohol." "For me the relationship with this drug, alcohol, began 30 years ago." "I know that after 30 years of heroin or cocaine use, you'd be lucky to be alive." "But what about alcohol?" "What has 30 years of this done to my body?" "I've stood here for a minute thinking about this liver test that I'm going to have." "And...it occurs to me that, on the one hand, it's likely to be absolutely fine and on the other hand," ""What if it's not OK?"" "I'm not sure if I'm prepared for that." "And I know I'm not prepared for a doctor to tell me that I have to stop drinking." "That's quite a shocking thought." "When did you first have an alcoholic drink?" "A proper drink?" "Yes." "I would say I was 15." "And can you tell me what the circumstances of that were?" "Yeah, it was..." "It was kids messing around and an older kid..." "We were on our bikes summer afternoon in the country and an older kid managed to buy some alcohol from a pub and brought it out and I had a half of bitter or something.Right." "What was the attitude to alcohol in your family?" "Hard to..." "Hard to look back andbe very clear about." "As I know now, my dad was developing quite a significant drinking problem himself." "What point do you think you then started to drink regularly?" "Um, I would say from about 16, 17." "I would say it took off from the runway a bit during the university years." "Rolling forwards, I think my drinking probably increased as a stress-buster." "I slipped into a habit of probably having two or three pints after work on an empty stomach, probably a few more though on a Friday night." "So, you'd have been consuming, on average, 30 units and above a week?" "Just look at your veins around your neck." "We're looking for any lymph nodes." "It's a routine examination." "So what had all these years of drinking done to me?" "Take a really deep breath in for me?" "The doctor was feeling for any sign that my organs had changed size." "Of your body is fighting with alcohol, your liver and spleen can swell." "And out..." "I'm just feeling to see if the liver's actually enlarged." "Deep breath in again." "And out." "And in again?" "OK." "I can just feel your liver tip when you breath in deeply, but you're a slim individual and I would see that as being normal." "A lot of the signs that we would look for are signs that you see in patients with cirrhosis and scarring, so..." "Can you be reassuring in that department?" "So far, it's looking all right." "You're going to feel a little probe on the side of your abdomen." "From the outside things looked OK but what about from the inside?" "A scan was looking at the density of my liver by passing vibrations through it." "The harder the liver had become by alcohol, the less vibrations would pass through." "The important figure is this one, the stiffness value and that's well within the normal range, so I would say that's a normal liver stiffness." "That's reassuring to you and me." "Immensely." "But there was a catch." "Apparently, unless I had advanced liver disease, no test would pick this up and by the time you feel the symptoms of liver damage you have a one-in-three chance of immediate death!" "Without opening me up, the best predictor of my liver was something I didn't want to think about." "We come down to history being the most important investigation of a patient's alcohol, whether there's alcohol playing a role in damaging the liver." "It's quite interesting how your drinking habits have changed over your lifetime." "However, you are drinking excessively and well outside the recommended limits for a male." "And the worry for me is the way you're packing it in over that three-day period of the weekend." "So it would be my advice... that you need to reduce what you're drinking over the weekend." "Do you think that what I could do is drink the same amount in total over the week, but just put the weekend consumption across the week so I've just spread it out." "Would that be..." "Would that be OK?" "It would be better for you." "You're still drinking well beyond your 24 units." "Dr Patch had allowed me 24 units." "Most guidelines say 21 units for men - that's two bottles of wine a week." "Or for women - 14 units - a bottle and a half." "I was drinking about a third more units than they say I should." "It was clear from the doctor's point of view, I drink too much." "I don't want to argue with that, but I'm not sure it's going to make me want to change my drinking pattern that much." "I think it should, but I'm not sure it's going to." "I do drink more than two units a day when I..." "I suppose, it would be a binge, wouldn't it?" "I need a drink." "Sometimes you just need a drink to have nice time." "I remember loving it." "I definitely drink to get drunk." "My reaction to the tests surprises me." "But considering my family history, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised." "There's a pub behind me here just underneath this tunnel that's made me remember a lot about my past." "It's the pub on the river that my dad used to visit most evenings after finishing work." "And he would stand at the bar, and as I understood it, he would drink quite heavily, get the train home, go on to another pub and drink heavily there, then arrive eventually at the family home." "I've got memories of him opening the door into the living room where we'd often be sitting watching TV, really worse for wear and he'd just glance round the room, not say a word, just shut the door and you'd hear him go upstairs to bed." "Did my dad worry about what it was doing to him?" "Most of us don't." "Quite a few of us are going to push our drinking to the extreme." "I always tend to drink a little bit more than I should." "I like to have that little bit extra." "By the time I've drunk it, that's when I think to myself," ""I said, we're not going to do this, and now I'm doing it."" ""Today, I'm not going to want to drink, I'm not going to drink."" "And then, by evening, you're thinking quite a lot about it." "Despite the doctor's advice that I should cut down" " I hadn't." "But why not?" "It's not as if the rules are difficult to understand and I follow other rules OK green lights, healthy food... but despite understanding the threat to my body, my brain wants to carry on regardless." "So why is this effect on me so powerful?" "At the addiction centre in Washington, they've devised a way of looking at the brain to answer precisely this question - what happens when alcohol hits it?" "This is cutting-edge science and I'm going to be on the end of it." "I guess, on the one hand, you'd think it would be quite easy to study the effects of alcohol, from the human, drinker's point of view." "You just get a subject to take a glass of alcohol and you could, I suppose, find out what's going on." "But it isn't that straightforward, is it?" "No, it's not, and as you say, it's critical to understand what really happens in the brain as alcohol hits it." "And yet, the nature of the drug is such that it's been very difficult." "For any given amount consumed the normal way, the amounts in the blood will vary about three- to four-fold." "So you can imagine if we would like to do functional brain imaging, and visualise what brain circuits are activated, it really is almost impossible." "'What the team did was to come up with a new technique." "'They would administer the alcohol intravenously 'so that my brain would receive a precise amount regardless of my metabolism or body size.'" "If you drink it, the amount in the blood for any given amount that is consumed, is extremely variable." "Depending on people's body weight, gender, many other things." "Here we can take all that variability out, we can size you up, we can basically take the model to predict exactly how much we need to give you in the drip to achieve exactly what is needed for the experiment." "'The experiment the team has specialised in 'is seeing what happens to the brain's reward circuitry 'when it's hit with alcohol.'" "OK." "You can put them down." "'As I'd be getting the alcohol straight into my blood, 'in case I had an adverse reaction," "'I'd first be infused outside the scanner.' 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, start." "'And then it was needle in and pump switched on, 'with me giving a running account of how it was making me feel.'" "It does feel quite cold.It does feel cold, it's kept at room temperature and your body is, of course, much hotter than that." "'But it was going to be a very weird experience." "'I was going to be given alcohol stripped away from normal social context." "'So would I get the feelgood effect?" "'Alcohol as a drug was also on trial.'" "How many drinks does it feel like you've had at this point?" "It's so hard to tell." "It's so divorced from how you would normally..." "The normal way I would drink alcohol is with a starter and a glass of red." "That's how I drink." "So this feels very different." "I'm not the person I was three or four minutes ago." "It's actually very nice." "Maybe that's a bad thing to say!" "SHE LAUGHS  God!" "We'll be doing breathalysers every four minutes or so." "'The amount of alcohol I would get would still keep me within the drink-drive limit." "'But I was getting it straight into my blood." "'And that made a difference.'" "Dave, I am completely in control." "I'm not so self-conscious." "If you imagine from my point of view, I'm sitting here with a whole bunch of people watching me." "I'm quite happy to be the guinea pig." "But I quite like lying back..." "HE LAUGHS" "I quite like lying here and just getting to it." "Do you feel any drug effects?" "Zero - not at all, five - al lot." "Three." "Do you like the effects you are feeling now?" "Four." "Would you like more of what you've received?" "Five." "Do you feel high?" "Three." "Do you feel intoxicated?" "Three." "'The team were used to watching people lose the plot." "'Using this method, they'd gathered data from enough subjects 'to know what was an average brain response to alcohol and what wasn't.'" "Yeah.We have about ten minutes more of the infusion.Good." "There's ten more minutes of the dose going up?" "Oh, you're toying with me now!" "Don't..." "Just..." "It's been a long day, right?" "It's been a long..." "You know, I've been working hard..." "It's not just the personal sacrifice, Dave." "Youdeservedthis." "I've earned this." "I've made my bed here!" "Oh, God." "Control yourself." "'At the back of my mind, I knew I was part of a scientific experiment." "'But the drug was changing my brain." "'And I was making a fool of myself.'" "No, so you're right, it's a very smew..." "Smew..." "It's a very smew..." "It's a very smewth..." "Do I like this?" "Big time." "SHELAUGHS" "Do I want more?" "Yes." "That's the other thing that worries me a bit..." "Yeah, don't turn the rig off." "It's still going!" "Well, we only have about 30 seconds left of it." "What?" "!" "What?" "!" "From zero to five, do you feel any drug effects?" "Four." "Do you like the effects you're feeling?" "Five." "Would you like more of what you have received?" "Five." "Do you feel high?" "Four." "And do you feel intoxicated?" "Four." "Four." "All right." "This is a drug that you, thatI, really like." "And it was very... ..euphoric." "The only alarming thing, I think, I'm left with is a sense that I could have easily have volunteered, if they'd have let me, for more." "'Next day, it was time to repeat the process." "'But in an even less social setting." "'I would be isolated in the scanner." "'This time they would see exactly what happened in my brain 'once it had been hit with alcohol." "'If I was one of those predisposed to get immense pleasure from drinking, 'it would show up in my brain reward circuitry 'the same as it might after a shot of heroin, 'or sex.'" "Six minutes to the infusion." "I'm gonna do a time point at 7 minutes and then one at 15." "We'll do the same on the way up." "Do you feel any drug effects?" "Uh, four." "Do you like the effects you're feeling?" "Five." "Would you like more of what you have received?" "Five." "Do you feel high?" "Four." "And do you feel intoxicated?" "Three." "OK, great, thank you." "We'll come get you out." "'An hour later and it was all over." "'They had what they needed." "'I was left feeling quite affected.'" "Luckily, inside there, I wasn't going to operate any machinery." "I was definitely, definitely high." "In a good way!" "Today, in there, it's different." "Everything is stripped away." "Everything is gone." "And what I'm left with, I think, was pure pharmacology." "A drug infused again, the same drug infused right into brain HQ." "But I'm alone, I'm in a brain scanner." "And, in a sense, the euphoria is less." "But you're well aware of a powerful drug at work." "It's quite strange." "'But there was more." "The team have found a genetic mutation 'in many of the people who have a really strong reaction to alcohol." "'If you get a big kick from drinking, it may mean you have this mutation." "'What if I did?" "'They'd taken a blood sample from me and that night were matching my brain images 'with my genetic test result." "'12% of white men have this mutation." "'Given how much I'd enjoyed that alcohol," "'I certainly couldn't rule myself out." "'The next day I'd know for sure.'" "It's not just like a neutral thing, like having blood pressure taken." "This could actually be a very important result that could link with the known family history that I have for alcoholism." "People vary quite a bit in how they react to alcohol, both subjectively and in terms of their brain activation." "Let me first show you two extremes." "So here's the brain of a person who reacted with a very high sense of intoxication." "This is basically the critical part of the brain reward circuitry of both sides and you can see how powerfully it lights up." "That's a clear area of activation." "Absolutely." "So this is one extreme and this person, incidentally, was family history positive." "There were people in his immediate family who had had alcohol use disorders." "Let's look at the person on the other extreme." "That's easy.There's nothing." "Nothing." "This guy, incidentally, did not have a family history of alcoholism, and did not report any subjective sense of intoxication." "But there's nothing at all." "Not at all." "But, of course, these are the two extremes." "What do you think you would fall between these two?" "I guess I could flip a coin and say in the middle." "Umm..." "But I know my history..." "OK." "You could, because you are right in the middle." "Ahhh." "Right in the middle, see?" "You have some degree of activation, this key relay station in the brain reward circuitry." "So that has activated following the infusion of alcohol?" "Absolutely." "And look at this..." "We've got all three." "So you would place me right in the middle of that continuum?" "In fact, it's not that I would, it's that the numbers would, because this is you." "Gosh, I'm Mr Average!" "You are the Average Joe." "If you fall right in the middle in terms of your response to alcohol, the likelihood of you having this variant of the OPRM1 gene that makes people perceive alcohol much more intensely is very low." "And, in fact, when we determined your gene type at this locus, you don't have the variant." "I don't have it?" "You do not." "'Even though I didn't have the gene mutation, 'something about the experience left me feeling quite strange.'" "I was being asked to rate how pleasurable the alcohol drug effect was and also whether I wanted more of it." "I felt I was giving strong ratings to say, yes, it's pleasurable and yes, I definitely want more." "And...it's interesting to think that there are other people, other drinkers, that would rate the pleasurable effects and the desire to get more even more strongly than I was." ""I'll have another wine."" ""Would you like another?" "Can I have a large one?"" "Soon as you drink, yeah, you're changing." "'What turns us to heavy drinking is not just driven by our genes." "'It's also down to personality and how we deal with life." "'With 20% of UK adults drinking dangerous amounts, 'working out how these factors connect is crucial." "'And this is exactly what they're trying to do in London, 'with children as young as 14." "'At the Institute Of Psychiatry, they've set up an unprecedented study 'involving 2,000 children." "'The aim is to try and work out how a healthy child 'turns into an adult addict." "'For each child, it starts with something simple 'but searching - a personality test.'" ""I often spend money until I run out of cash..." ""..or get into debt from using too much credit."" "I think that's neither true or false." ""I prefer spending money rather than saving it."" "Mostly true." "I could see they were looking for particular traits - impulsivity, reward-seeking, vulnerability to stress but I wasn't convinced the test could really act as a basis for prediction." "So I brought my scepticism to the scientist behind the scheme" " ProfessorSchumann." "Do you think when someone is as young as 14, can you really measure and distinguish a young character that's gonna be more or less likely to seek out alcohol effects?" "There are some basic behaviours that are associated with mental health and mental disorder." "This is known." "What we want to find out is what is actually happening in the brain." "Are you OK there?" "Yes." "'Unlike my experience in Washington, 'in their reward test they wouldn't be receiving alcohol 'but scientists believe that watching how their brain responds to any reward 'will be revealing." "The children had to play a game to try and win sweets.'" "The question of this task is would you like a smaller reward right now or would you like the potential of a larger reward later." "People who are very reward dependent would want a small reward right away." "What would that mean in terms of drinking?" "You may find alcohol gives you reward, if you're then very dependent on the reward, you will be more likely to drink." "None of these children currently have any known predisposition to drinking, but their brain images will be linked to detailed genetic and personality tests to try and form a profile of a person who is at risk." "You can't, I guess, look round corners at this point." "Could you be wrong?" "Well, yeah, sure." "HE LAUGHS" "I mean that's why we're making studies because we don't know exactly." "But I think very much will depend on asking the kids, asking the adolescents in say, four years' time once they have actually been exposed to alcohol drinking." "Some of them will have...a risk-drinking pattern, perhaps even be dependent already." "Then we can move back and say, "OK, this could have predicted it."" "Understanding exactly who will turn to drink is a complicated question, but the one thing I know as an addiction expert is that whichever drug people choose, their relationship with it will change." "Weare all capable of slipping into a serious drinking problem." "I didn't want my alcohol in the morning, but come lunchtime..." "Let's go have a drink." "Must have a drink." "Your body starts getting accustomed to having a certain time of the day where you will drink." "Even though you say, "No, no, no," consciously up there it's waiting for that time to come." "From what I know with other addictions, people will quietly start to organise their life around their access to the drug." "And sothey will with drink." "Their relationship with alcohol has changed." "It's become a much more regular part of their life, much more at centre stage, than previously." "You constantly think about it." "Wake up - you're thinking about it." "Asleep - you're thinking about it." "I don't think it strikes you at the time how often you're drinking and how much you are until you try to stop." "That's what happened to me" " I tried to stop." "I'm not in control no more." "I'm not able to get up so..." "I knew what the drink was making me..." "It's making me..." "How can I put it?" "Dependent on it." "I'm starting to become dependent and something I said I would never be, I'm slowly becoming." "What also starts to slowly change is the amount you'd need to drink to get the same effect." "An alcoholic isn't just created overnight." "It seems to take years of subtle incremental changes." "That was really what happened in the case of my father." "Changes occurred gradually over time." "His drinking became more and more intensive and sustained and problematic." "No-one sets out to be an alcoholic and he certainly didn't." "It just happened." "Alcohol is SUCH a dangerous drug." "Already 7% of UK adults are showing signs of dependency and in less than a decade the number of us going tohospital because of drink has gone up 70%." "So should we even drink at all?" "A colleague of mine has come up with a seriously radical idea." "He wants to eliminate alcohol, to design an alternative drug - one that you could simply add to a soft drink." "But the difference is itwould not be addictive, it would not harm your brain or your body." "You'd get all the benefits of drink without the danger." "If his drug works, ideally the next generation of children will never even touchalcohol." "He's in the research stage and I'm going be part of the experiment." "David, I've sometimes heard it said alcohol is so damned dangerous that if it was discovered today, it would be banned." "That is undoubtedly the case." "We are currently banning drugs that are very similar to alcohol, like GHB, GBL, butanediol." "These are all alcohol equivalents, sedating drugs which are very dangerous in overdose." "Those are banned or being banned and I've no doubt if alcohol was discovered today it would be controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act." "If I'm going to take this similar, but not identical compound, what am I gonna experience?" "Well, I'm not gonna give you any suggestions." "I want you to see how you feel on the drug.OK." "I want you to reflect during the process and afterwards how it compares with alcohol." "Walk as straight as you can." "'The drug was likely to make me feel tipsy, 'so before I even took the pill they had to check my normal balance." "'It was at this point thatthe enormity of what I was doing hit home.'" "That's great." "As I start to think about whether this is gonna work or not," "I'm left with a sense that actually it could be quite a powerful effect." "Maybe it'll give me some effects I don't like." "So I'm a bit.." "Now I think about it," "I'm a more apprehensive subject than I was a few minutes ago." "'This was a highly experimental drug - 'only a few people had ever tried it 'and the condition was that I was in a hospital, closely observed with resuscitation equipment on hand.'" "Perfect." "Will you take each of these, please?" "OK." "Down the hatch?" "Down the hatch.OK." "'The drug would target some of the same receptors in my brain that alcohol does, 'but I didn't know which ones.'" "Thank you." "So I just, um...sit back..." "Sit back and do whatever you'd do if you were drinking, yes." "Don't know if you want to share that with us." "THEY LAUGH" "I can definitely feel something." "And what I'm feeling is er... relaxed, there's beginning to be a slight tendency to want to smile which for some reason I'm controlling at the moment." "But I'm beginning to feel a little lighter and my mood is definitely much higher than it was this morning." "I arrived a bit stressed, a long journey and... rather nice now." "There was a smile." "LAUGHS" "A short while later I made a surprising judgement." "If I compare this feeling to alcohol, it's quite hard to do." "I'd have to say, that I'd vote for the three pills from Dr Nutt." "Em..." "There's something more... smooth and pleasurable and...just relaxing and..." "Yeah, just nice." "'Alcohol works on so many systems in the brain - 'so far this drug was successfully tranquilising me " "'I felt emotionally calm and physicallytotally relaxed.'" "If you can stand on the red line." "The floor's not level." "You've changed the floor." "Are you having to work harder?" "Yes, a lot harder!" "HE LAUGHS" "That's quite strange." "'I couldn't walk, but I didn't care.'" "David..." "How are you doing?" "Are you still awake?" "Do some people fall asleep?" "Yeah, yeah." "Some people do." "It's very nice." "Not exactly the same as with alcohol." "Can you comment on the differences?" "Maybe less of a euphoric high and more of a body experience." "I guess that's what the pharmacology would tell us." "So we can deal with that side of alcohol but the challenge is more trying to get more of the upside.Yeah." "This is probably like caveman first meets rotten fruit." "THEY LAUGH" "'David Nutt's drug couldn't imitate all of the effects of alcohol 'but it did have a unique bonus." "It's effects could be reversed." "'This is impossible with alcohol." "'There is no known antidote to that drug." "But one injection after this new alternative 'and you're back to normal.'" "So you know what I'm going to do now?" "Take it all away from me." "Yes, we are." "Feel anything?" "Yes, a slight cold sensation." "Put this back on." "Right.Definitely feeling something." "Yeah?" "Yes.So you're waking up now, are you?" "It's really strange because the room has..." "The focus that I have around the room has tightened." "You were a bit soft-focussed a minute ago." "Definitely..." "It's as if someone's polished the windows.Yes." "And so I left." "But within the hour I started to feel more drowsy thanever, like in a waking dream." "I had been warned that the reversing drug might not last, but I hadn't expected this." "I don't quite know what to make of it really." "I understand an alcohol hangover all too well..." "I try and avoid having them but when" "I have one I know exactly what it is." "This is unknown and I'm not sure what to do to ease the symptoms." "I'm also not clear about how it's going to last." "There's a sort of discomfort and slight edge of worry that is borne out of that new substance." "I'm not in my hangover comfort zone." "HE LAUGHS If that makes sense." "'That's one of the reasons alcohol is going to be such a hard act to follow 'but also why David has to keep trying." "'Alcohol's become the devil we know." "We've even forgiven it for the pain it causes.'" "I woke up thinking, "I wonder what happened last night?"" "You never think about stopping." "You keep drinking." "Hangover's are horrendous." "I woke up this morning and I was like, "Oh, I feel rough."" "So it's the end of the night and the beginning of a new day." "And I've seen so many stories where alcohol has been an integral part - celebrations, and then the cruel and nasty side of alcohol, I guess." "The fights, disappointments, arguments." "And what I'm seeing is the clear-up operation." "People all around, really, tidying up... bottles, hundreds of them." "And how many countless thousands of people, in an hour from now, will wake up with a rotten hangover, say to themselves, "That's it." "I'm not doing that again."" "And sure as day, by the time evening comes, they'll have another drink." "Once it's got its hooks into you, you really do know." "It's become my mate." "So the answer to, "How much should I really drink?" is in some ways very simple." "21 units for a man, 14 for a woman." "But what I've learnt in making this film is that the answer is complicated." "Each of us has a particular relationship with alcohol from childhood and the important thing I think is to try and look at that relationship and ask somesimple questions." "What it's for?" "Why do I do it?" "Could I do withoutit?" "Because only then can you really answer the question for yourself." "So where does that leave me?" "Well, I like alcohol." "I can't deny it." "I don't want to deny it." "But what I realise is that I have an uneasy relationship with this drug because in order to not get into difficulty with it," "I have to think, I have to be aware of what I'm doing." "I can never, paradoxically, I can never relax with alcohol." "I've got to be on guard." "What an odd thing to think?" "I wish I'd never started drinking." "WOMAN:" "I like it." "I like drink." "MAN:" "I'm drinking because it becomes a way of escape." "So I'm asking myself, "Where are we going from here?"" "As a psychologist, it seems to me that as a society, we're not even contemplating change." "We seem comfortable with continuing to drink and the signs are drinking more and more and more." "In the end, there's one question for each and everyone of us." ""Is it really worth it?"" "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"