Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. But if you ask medical student Niels Pesser, it will soon get a lot easier to get up in the morning. Together with his father, who is a pharmacist, he now sells the anti-hangover pill Zober!

The idea emerged about four years ago during a cycling holiday. Father Jacco and son Niels were cycling through the mountains and after a long ride, the man go to a restaurant and drink several glasses of wine.

‘The next morning, your bike ride does not feel as good’, says Niels in his dad pharmacy in Hoeven. ‘Then we started thinking: wouldn’t it be possible to do something about it?’ Back in the Netherlands, the two started looking up scientific literature about hangovers. Niels’ experience as a medical student and Jacco’s knowledge of pharmacy were very useful. They found a remedy against a hangover that is so ordinary, it seems too good to be true: green tea.

The developers of the Zober! pill are quite secretive about the exact ingredients of the pill. ‘We do not want to risk that big companies can copy our recipe’, explains Jacco. What he does want to tell, is that the tea they use is imported from China. And the caffeine is removed from it – that does not improve a good sleep.

The village pharmacy in Hoeven, that father Jacco owns, is the birth ground of Zober! Even today, a black substance is cooking on the stove, and it turns out to be the tea. ‘The tea only holds a small amount of the active ingredient. By evaporating it, we can eventually put a high concentration of it in the pill.’

If the pill works, it would be revolutionary

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The most important question is: does the pill, which is for sale online since a couple of weeks, actually work? Frans Russel, professor pharmacology and toxicology at Radboud University, is not convinced. At Vox’s request, Russel searched scientific literature about the effect of green tea on hangovers. The connection exists, but it is never proven that green tea can make a hangover disappear.

Russel: ‘Based on what I read, I expect it to be an ineffective preparation. The effect tea has on the degradation of alcohol is 10 to 15 percent. So if the body normally needs an hour to break down a glass of beer, it will now need fifty minutes. That is not very beneficial.’ Moreover, Russel emphasizes, that result came from research on mice. ‘It has not been tested on people.’

Russel also makes a side note: ‘To know for sure if the pill works, it needs to be tested. If it would work, that would be revolutionary. It would be the first anti-hangover pill that actually does what it promises.’

Jacco en Niels Pesser are convinced the pill works. They have tested it themselves and heard positive comments from the people around them. If Zober! does not sell, they are not too disappointed. ‘In that case, it has cost us some money, but at least we had a lot of fun together.’