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Comment by drngdds | Hacker News Reader

Not for people who don't drink or would be willing to stop drinking. That has to be a nontrivial market. Why not make it and just put a big warning label on the bottle?

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Even for people who don't drink, there's still small amounts of alcohol in some medication, mouth wash, etc. If the severity of the reaction is high enough, even small amounts could lead to a medical emergency.

I hear what you're saying here, but just taking what the article was saying, that shouldn't be much of an issue.

    Then one of the participants drank some contraband Scotch and became 
    unusually, violently ill. He confessed his transgression to the 
    researchers, and follow-up studies confirmed his account: WIN 18,446 
    didn’t mix well with booze.

I suspect this inmate was more than a little liquored up. Just a guess. But more importantly this part:

    WIN’s side effects sounded familiar to Amory. In his clinical practice, 
    he’d occasionally prescribed Antabuse (disulfiram) to patients who 
    struggled with alcohol addiction. The drug blocks a form of the enzyme 
    acetaldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), which helps the body metabolize 
    alcohol;

which means it's effects are used in practice to combat alcoholism.

Can't be that bad. Though, that still means that there could be other interactions not described?

>That has to be a nontrivial market.

Yes, but it might be so much smaller a market than a male contraceptive without that problem that the company decided it wouldn't be able to recoup its development costs.

I was looking up numbers in the US and came across this:

> 30% of american adults don't drink at all

> the top 10% of drinkers consume 74 drinks per week (over 10 drinks per day)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...

Wow, that's horrifying.

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