Remember David Nutt suggesting his own heavily branded benzos as a "replacement" for alcohol?

He was technically absolutely right that alcohol was worse than most illegal drugs (what he was unfairly fired for saying), but man, he had major white coat blinders. Terribly naive and oblivious to what science besides neuroscience could say about drug use. Good thing his "synthetic alcohol" benzos didn't catch on.

Which benzos was he peddling? I don’t recall that.

I remember him touting a substance he called “chaperon”, about ten years back, as an alcohol alternative. But it wasn’t a benzo, it was somewhere in the phenethlyamine superfamily IIRC (the internet tells me it was MEAI, a substituted, cyclized PEA).

He now has a company selling non-alcoholic spirit substitutes based on herbal ingredients, called Sentia, and is trying to get approval for something called “alcarelle” but I have no idea what class of substance that is and it hasn’t yet made it to market so saying it didn’t catch on seems a touch premature.

I don’t agree with the characterisation of him as naive, in fact I think his book delves into the societal and social effects of drugs quite well. The only way he could be considered naive IMHO is that he seems to have expected politicians to listen to reason.