This Implant Is An Alcoholic’s Worst Nightmare And Best Chance At Quitting

Alcoholism is a difficult addiction to overcome. Alcoholics Anonymous and other similar support groups wouldn’t exist if heavy drinkers could just give up the bottle any time they wanted, like so many of them stereotypically claim. With the help of a new kind of implant, however, this might finally be possible. Unfortunately, it also comes with a rather nightmarish privacy issue.

Very few people, if any actually enjoy being watched or monitored 24/7, but that is what an alcoholic patient would be signing up for if they decided to use an implant made by University of California San Diego (UCSD) researchers. This one cubic millimeter biosensor will act as something of an ankle bracelet. Only, instead of beeping when the wearer exits a designated area, it goes nuts when it detects alcohol.

As the project’s lead researcher Drew Hall said in a press release, the whole point to the implant is to help alcoholics develop a routine that they will stick to. It would certainly be difficult to fool people into thinking that a person has given up drinking if there’s a literal tattletale inside them all the time.

“The ultimate goal of this work is to develop a routine, unobtrusive alcohol and drug monitoring device for patients in substance abuse treatment programs,” Hall said.

While it may be potentially effective, perhaps the most effective method conceived so far, it’s also incredibly intrusive. As Futurism points out, this isn’t like the breathalyzer or blood tests that addicts would often have to contend with. It’s about having a monitor inside of them that will keep watch over them at all hours of the day.

What’s more, it seems even the researchers don’t know as much about the implant as they really should. The degree of difficulty in removing the implant, for example, is still in question.