The Economist How to study people who are very drunk Sept. 3rd 2025 Visitors to Minnesota’s state fair in 2024 could hear live music, enjoy white-knuckle rides and compete to make the best tinned goods. They could also get drunk. And if they did, a team of neuroscientists from the local university was waiting to gently torture them. The researchers were on site to test how well alcohol can numb pain. Although booze’s analgesic effect has been understood for centuries, experts did not know if it continued or tailed off with greater consumption. Testing either hypothesis in a controlled trial, where guidelines limit how much a subject can be asked to consume, is difficult. “Ethically, we can’t ask people to drink alcohol to levels they do in their day-to-day lives,” says Jeff Boissoneault of the Minnesota Alcohol and Pain lab