In the future of Syntehol, is there underage drinking?
- Thread starter Unnamed Caitian
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I've been curious about the legality of drugs in the future. Raffi vaped space weed and was a former addict, but I'm curious what else there is. Did 20something Jean Luc ever do a line? He was supposedly a wild child before he got stabbed through the heart.
I think that’s too much of a realistic perspective on it, though. The way it’s described, it sounds like outright magic rather than anything realistic, you get as drunk as you like, but somehow, you can just immediately stop being drunk by an act of will. There’s no real-world analogue.
I’ve always wondered about the mechanics. It’d make more sense if there was some kind of antidote you had to take, rather than just becoming sober spontaneously. Do you have be taught or trained how to trigger synthehol to dissolve, like learning to flex a new muscle? Is it based on heart rate? Concentration? That last one seems like the most likely from how it’s described, in which case you’d probably have to practice to stay drunk on synthehol and not accidentally sober up because you decided to play darts or tie your shoes or something and focused too hard without thinking.
On the other hand, if you have to be careful to remain in the mindset of a person who’s been drinking, I suppose that’s a point for the “it’s just a mocktail” argument. There have been studies about the power of suggestion, that if people drink nonalcoholic wine or beer and think they’re drinking alcohol, they’ll still act drunk. Maybe synthehol is a scam by the Ferengi, overpriced soft-drinks that are just placebos.
That is against authorial intent, though. Synthehol is meant to be an incomprehensible miracle of the future.
I wish I could find the Phase II memo where Roddenberry first proposed what became synthehol in TNG. It was posted here ages ago, but I didn’t save it, and I didn’t find it in the Reeves-Stevens book. There was a second section where he talked the one drawback he could see to retconning his optionally-alcoholic alcohol in to the universe, that Scotty was clearly a functional alcoholic, and they’d either have to retcon that out entirely, establish that he was actually a sophisticated synthehol-enjoyer the whole time, or say he was an eccentric that preferred real booze over the stuff that made abuse impossible.
Try the Sackett book on the making of TMP? Pretty sure it's either there or in one of the "status reports" she did for Starlog in 77-79.
There would still be "UnderAge Drinking" because "Real Alcoholic Beverages" would co-exist with Synthehol.
And the regulations for Alcoholic Beverages wouldn't change, while Synthehol would be accessible to minors due to lack of age limits.
And the regulations for Alcoholic Beverages wouldn't change, while Synthehol would be accessible to minors due to lack of age limits.
I think there is in fact a real-world analogue - the placebo effect.
You know the TV trope of a middle-schooler grabbing mojito mix without understanding the principles of cocktails, and them and their friends getting "drunk" off it, because they think they will? Or the high-schooler who tells his friends he'll score a keg, but all he gets in the end is non-alcoholic beer so he lies about it and the party gets wild anyway?
In chronic pain medicine, we see a baseline 30% response rate in studies to anything we try, and that's in people who are genuinely suffering from a significant, often crippling, burden of physical disease.
We don't yet understand the neurochemical basis for it, but it's a real and measurable phenomenon, and everything that's real and measurable has a physiological basis.
I've often criticized the double bind that the current, narrow interpretation of the hippocratic oath places on doctors treating pain. I'm not allowed to prescribe a $1 bottle of medical Tic Tacs and lie about the contents for the benefit of the placebo effect, even though I know, from a mountain of studies, that it would improve the pain of 30% of the people who walk through the door without posing a single risk of dangerous side effects. And yet charlatans can charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to manipulate people's energy fields, or "prescribe" them bottles of water with the "powerful memory" of things that "used to be" in the water, and 30% of them will find it genuinely helps them.
But my point is that it is an entirely realistic thought, from my perspective, that humanity will at some point identify the neural pathways responsible for the placebo effect and harness them directly somehow. Right now, it dissipates as soon as you discover you're under its effects. Conscious processing happens in the prefrontal cortex, and we know that there are many "top-down" inhibitory pathways that originate there. You can suppress pain, hunger, behavioural impulses, and even lower your own heart rate and blood pressure through conscious thought (that last one takes practice meditating, but we have the studies to prove that anyone can learn to do it). So, it stands to reason that the placebo effect is happening somewhere in the brain that is innervated by such a top-down negative feedback pathway, as well.
I have no idea if the person who dreamed up synthehol had some kind of neuroscience degree, or if it just coincidentally fits the profile, but it really just sounds like synthehol is directly stimulating the part of the brain that gets hit by the placebo effect. And that explains why it's "easily dismissed." It doesn't require for you to be lied to, and the truth doesn't involuntarily dismiss it like it, but with conscious effort (like the thought, "I'm done partying, I have work to do, the Klingons just attacked the damn ship!"), you might be able to simply dismiss its effects entirely. You, in essence, are getting middle-school drunk off your mom's mojito mix from the kitchen cupboard. You just don't need to be in the dark about how alcohol works, or lied to about the contents of the glass. And as soon as you're no longer in the mood to party, you snap out of it.
How was that supposed to work? Do you think "sober" and boom, you're straight.
It's not really magic nor an act of will, it's just that synthehol isn't really alcohol, but rather an artificial substitute that does nothing to most people. You really got to have a biology that's different from the average humanoid to get drunk from it.
How was any one of GR's fucking concepts of perfection supposed to work?How was that supposed to work? Do you think "sober" and boom, you're straight.
Wizards, I suppose.
Roddenberry just wanted people to have a way to get drunk without suffering consequences and he deemed it so and called it "synthehol." Wish-fulfillment, maybe.
No.
Scotty didn't like it
And he's a man who knows his way around a well stocked bar.
No to your no. Synthehol was called a substitute onscreen, so that's what it is. Sorry if you disagree with that.
SCOTTY (to Ten-Forward bartender): Laddie, I was drinking Scotch a hundred years before you were born and I can tell you that whatever this is, it is definitely not Scotch.
DATA: I believe I may be of some assistance. Captain Scott is unaware of the existence of synthehol.
SCOTTY: Synthehol?
DATA: Yes, sir. It is an alcohol substitute now being served aboard starships. It simulates the appearance, taste and smell of alcohol, but the intoxicating affects can be easily dismissed...
--from the TNG episode "Relics"
DATA: I believe I may be of some assistance. Captain Scott is unaware of the existence of synthehol.
SCOTTY: Synthehol?
DATA: Yes, sir. It is an alcohol substitute now being served aboard starships. It simulates the appearance, taste and smell of alcohol, but the intoxicating affects can be easily dismissed...
--from the TNG episode "Relics"
How was that supposed to work? Do you think "sober" and boom, you're straight.
If you read my post directly above yours, there's a realistic way this could work in terms of the onset of the effect.
The trigger for terminating the effect could literally be something as simple and currently-understood as adrenaline (quick) or cortisol (slower) release, which are part of the involuntary stress response. So not necessarily "wishing to be sober," but functionally similar. You're having fun chilling and hanging out at the party? Great, you're buzzed. Your friend breaks their leg, or your captain calls you to your duty station and you need to switch into "business mode"? Bam, snapped out of it.
The concept is not at all at odds with human physiology. Have you ever felt like you needed to use the bathroom, but then something really important/urgent came up and the feeling was suppressed until you relaxed again? That's top-down negative feedback in action, a major mechanism the brain uses to select which signals are getting through. No reason to think that, in the age of warp drive and transporters, pharmaceuticals wouldn't be developed that harnessed currently-understood principles in advanced ways.
If TNG's "Symbiosis" is anything to go by, addiction and substance abuse are so rare that Wesley (who is supposed to be knowledgeable for his age) has to have the entire concept explained because it's so foreign to him.
It also makes no sense that Sythehol would have an advantage over standard alcohol when it comes to substance abuse. IF there's still a buzz from drinking it, it would stand to reason there would be "syntheholics" just the same as alcoholics who would abuse it to the point of being sloppy drunk. The fact you might be able to snap out of being sloppy drunk would definitely be an advantage, but you'd still get people who would become addicted to the feeling and get to a point where it would affect the functioning of their lives in the same way alcoholics do with alcohol.
I just chalk that up to early installment weirdness, because later episodes of TNG and series contradict it a lot.
Another thing is Picard not knowing what a headache is in early TNG, Beverly acting like they're crazy rare, but headaches get mentioned quite a bit more in later episodes and series.
But...why? I mean I'm a teetotaller (because I had a violent alcoholic as a father and do not want to risk to ever get drunk) but every single time I even tried alcohol it either tasted absolutely vile.
Some of it tasted alright, but only because it had other stuff mixed into it that masked the taste of the alcohol (melon liqueur for example) and in those cases there is usually a non-alcoholic variant.
So my impression was always that people drank alcohol because of the buzz, not the taste.
But I know everybody has their different preferences.
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