That laugh haunts me to this day. Not again.

The way memory works in the brain is heavily state dependent. That means that your recall and recognition of past ideas/events is based on how you feel, what you are wearing, mental state, drunkenness, drugged/not, sleepiness, and pretty much any other state of being you can think of. The closer you are to the state that you were when you learned or experienced something, the easier it will be to recall.

This doesn't un-do the depreciation in memory you get from drinking, or anything else. Getting black out drunk wont help you get your blackout memories back, you'll just forget what you were trying to do.

Remember, we only use the justice system for justice when it works. When it doesn't, its just called justice.

Get a blood toxicology scan, ask to check for being drugged.

Um, actually--

Mammals have internal circadian rhythms. Humans will drift up about 24.5 hours on average without sun, with significant variance.

We are amazing at syncing our clocks do another system, though I don't know how we'd handle 48 hours.

Separately, you assume we've always were 16/8. South America, mostly Mexico, used to an extended rest in the day time. Before the industrial revolution, many cultures would sleep from dusk till midnight, get up for a few hours and do community activities, and then sleep until early morning.