Last year I wrote about Alcopal – an internet snake oil medicine that claimed to be able to make people pass the breathalyser test even if they’d drunk around five pints of beer. The posts relating to it are listed below:
- Alcopal: Sold By Dickheads, FOR Dickheads
- An Alcopal Update
- Does Alcopal Work?
- Does Alcopal Work? (Update)
The articles remain popular – with an inordinate number of people finding it on search terms indicating that they are looking to use Alcopal rather than read about it, and many of those originating from Poland (make of that what you will).
Another blogger, JosephineJones, has picked up on it. As a result of that I discovered a news story I hadn’t seen before. It dates from January this year, and is mainly concerned with an alleged gun incident involving Arthur Kibble – the “entrepreneur” with the dubious distinction of being the man who introduced Alcopal to the UK. However, a few more titbits can be gleaned from the story.
I didn’t realise that Kibble was an ex-policeman. But even more entertaining are his latest comments.
He now states that Alcopal…
…stops alcohol entering the blood stream, re-directing it to the kidneys.
This is bollocks. To get to the kidneys it would HAVE to get into the blood stream. And if neat alcohol got anywhere near your kidneys, it would destroy them! He goes on…
I am not advocating that motorists get blind drunk and then try to drive…
So why are you bloody selling it? And he continues…
And I must stress that these tablets do nothing to improve the performance of a driver who has been drinking…
So the only thing they do is MASK alcohol, otherwise they WOULD lead to an improvement in performance.
But the best part is that Kibble was selling these things at £35 for 5 tablets. The actual cost price for that number of tablets, containing “herbal” ingredients and carbon, would be infinitesimally small. Even Viagra only costs about £1-£2 per tablet from dodgy online retailers – the cost price to pharmacies is much less. Kibble somehow rated Alcopal at £7 a pop!
But better still is the fact that for Alcopal to “work”, you need to take three tablets before you drink, and two after. So it will cost you £35 on top of the £10 you spent on booze.
It would be far simpler either to not drink – or not drive. A taxi or the bus would be a lot cheaper.