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The difficulty of putting a lid on our alcohol drinking for a month or more provides us with important understanding of alcohol and the often bewildering public debate around it.

How can we understand the impact of advertising, taxation tweaks or the complex interplay of mind, body and environment? The answer is, by experiencing them ourselves.

Having an ad for our favourite tipple pop up just as we managed to ignore the urge to pour ourselves one helps us understand how advertising stimulates alcohol demand.

The effort we need to make to swerve the alcohol aisle in the supermarket or the offie shows how availability is a challenge to those wanting to limit their consumption.

How can we understand the social pressures to drink alcohol without at some point trying to rebuff the alcoholic ribbing of our friends, family and colleagues?

Opening our wallets to find folding money in there on Sunday morning shows us in no uncertain terms that increasing alcohol prices increases the incentive to cut down.

So it is that Dry January, and all similar short-term quitting initiatives, offer valuable first-hand insight into the key elements of the policy discussion around alcohol.

It allows us to feel first-hand the challenges faced by anyone looking to reduce their alcohol intake, difficulties experienced most intensely by those of us most deeply affected.

Dry January and the like establish a valuable common ground of shared experience which can inform an often off-putting discussion which, nevertheless, has huge potential to improve health and well-being.

The exercise of quitting alcohol, albeit often temporary, connects a personal assessment of the benefits of changing our own alcohol habits to something far wider.

A DIY quitting exercise was fundamental to my writing. Alcohol’s complex challenges need to be tackled with empathy as well as analytical thought.

Wider understanding provides the platform needed for informed alcohol policy. Dry initiatives go a long way towards informing us on every level. ■

The world continued to bump its way through the covid pandemic, with alcohol playing a fringe role in public discussion, despite inflicting a far heavier death toll than before.

The year ended with the discovery that the US suffered a mystery 26% increase in alcohol-induced deaths last year, according to provisional CDC figures. This is higher than the UK’s 19% and five times the rise in Germany. The unexplained leap is set to be followed by 14% rise this year. The closest thing to an explanation for the US rise is the rise of home delivery.

In November Wales launched the first framework for caring for people with alcoholic brain damage, about 10% of people with dementia. At the same time the alcohol industry boasted that one in five alcoholic drinks in the UK does not include official guidelines, five years after they were introduced.

A lack of adequate labelling partly explains why few Brits know the basic facts about the alcoholic drinks they consume. Just one in five know how many calories are in their alcoholic drinks or know the official low-risk drinking guidelines, a survey found in July.

The UK Budget in October ignored health advice, freezing alcohol tax in 2022. This means prices will fall relative to inflation, so lowering the barriers to deadly levels of drinking despite 2020’s record rise. Tax reforms slated for 2023 were praised, but also leave a loophole for ultra-cheap cider.

There was little positive news for those who might develop alcohol drinking problems. Local government alcohol treatment services have seen their budgets cut by 17% over the last five years, according to Health Foundation figures. Alcohol was not part of its drugs strategy in December.

Not having an alcohol strategy may ultimately prove unpopular, with steps to help to curb future alcohol drinking problems wildly popular among the British public. Three-quarters of Brits want to see curbs on alcohol ads reaching children, an Alcohol Health Alliance survey found in August.

Not having an alcohol policy also runs counter to the government’s goal of “levelling up” society. A third of England’s alcohol deaths were among the most deprived, a Public Health England report said in July. Why, some ask, avoid popular policies and undermine a central manifesto commitment?

The government’s position was first confirmed in April by then health minister Lord Bethell to a parliamentary committee. His wife is a board member of alcohol giant Diageo and Tescos, the biggest UK alcohol retailer. Alcohol Review‘s reporting was followed up by Private Eye. He was removed in September amid controversy over covid contracts.

Among those who might appreciate action to spare media consumers of constant reminders about something we wish to avoid is the newly-sober-curious Queen Elizabeth. In October Vanity Fair reported she is skipping her favoured martinis ahead of her Platinum Jubilee in June.

French footballer Paul Pogba caused a stir in July when he tried to skip endorsing a Heineken-branded alcohol-free beer in a Euro 2020 [sic] press conference. Alcohol Review discovered it may be an option only open to the religious, Alcohol Review , and apparent breach of UN human rights principles.

The end of the covid era may finally be nigh, but only time will tell whether shortcomings that have led to so many more alcohol deaths are corrected or ignored. ■

On the eve of Brexit and the Budget I talked with Scott Corfe, research director of the Social Market Foundation think-tank about his proposals for a more rational form of alcohol tax.

• “If an increase in alcohol tax has a regressive impact, you can mitigate that elsewhere, through more generous benefits or through curbing other types of tax.” [19m04s]
• “Minimum alcohol pricing and alcohol duty are policies which have different impacts.” Duty might be a way to cut drinking among higher income groups, who are the biggest drinkers. [13m51s]
• The Conservatives have committed to a review of alcohol duties, possibly diverging from EU rules. Nevertheless, “This might be an area where Europe puts its foot down.” [13m06s]

Taking an alcohol break, as many are doing now, can be seen as a step towards a purposeful pursuit of pure pleasure, or hedonism, instead of a spartan act of self-denial.

Maximising pleasure is more than giving ourselves a series of nice feelings. Otherwise we might simply lie around all the time gorging ourselves on delicious snacks and, er, tickling ourselves.

Some pleasures we discover are transient and not connected to anything else. So, over time, we learn not to invest excessive amounts of time in pleasures which do not pay off, or which bring downsides.

Thankfully, however, as uniquely sophisticated, conscious mammals capable of reasoning, our range of pleasures are uniquely wide, varied and adaptable. It is no coincidence they take in activities which help us thrive.

We typically get great pleasure from learning, practising and succeeding, getting a buzz from passing exams and triple-twenties in darts. And we enjoy work, music, movement, socialising, sights, sounds and sensations.

And we can even conjure joy from outwardly tedious activities which pay off. Some of us can, for instance, with the right mind-games, elicit unlikely gratification from catching up with paperwork or sweeping behind the tumble dryer.

Epicurus, a Greek hedonist from 2,300 year ago (pictured), plumped for chilling in a communal garden talking with mates about philosophy. He rejected the idea that drinking a lot of alcohol as the best route to pleasure.

Alcohol, a psychoactive, gives us an out-sized impression of its reward. This can mean we invest more time and energy in alcohol than it deserves. Our human relish for persistence in the face of hardship does us no favours here.

We can persist in drinking alcohol even though it  brings scant pleasure and is causing us grief. We can want alcohol without liking it, with its pleasures and rewards long outweighed by hangovers, crappy sleep and low mood. 

Not drinking for a month or longer is a good way for us to weigh up the pleasures and downsides of alcohol. What things positive and negative do we correctly attribute to it? And what downsides does it have we did not notice?

It can take us from three months to a year to be free of side-effects that heavier alcohol drinking can bring, like anxiety and low or changeable mood. If we make one month it can be worth banking the investment and carrying on.

Taking time without alcohol is a route to finding more pleasure in life. And it can also be the beginning of a life devoted to pursuing of long lasting pleasures without serious downsides. This is a pure form of hedonism. 

Stopping alcohol for any length of time we choose is not a hair-shirt exercise. It is time we can use to rid ourselves of any illusions conjured up by alcohol and to focus on greater pleasures. ■

Creating change around alcohol and elsewhere requires us to describe dynamic situations accurately, an area where English could be improved.

Our language often ties us to a static picture of situations more usefully seen as being in dynamic change, so blinding us to possibilities.

We are not, for instance, smokers in the same way we are right-handed, brown-eyed, male or female.

Being a smoker is a status we acquire as a result of what we consume and something we can change by making different choices.

English we say, “I am a smoker,” in the same way as, “I am from Manchester,” or “I am human.” But they are not the same.

In this way, as my brilliant friend and first giveaway book recipient pointed out,  we English-speakers have made a hash of it.

“There is no escape save by stepping out of it into another [language],” as Enlightenment polymath Alexander von Humboldt put it.

Not “to be”
If we are serious about change we should distinguish between inherent states and transient ones.

Making the distinction clear would  help us all see better where fruitful change is possible.

Portuguese and Spanish—and other Iberian languages—have a way to do this built in, using the word “estar” for potentially passing states.

Mixing it into English unforgivably, “I estar alcohol dependent,” would mean we are currently alcohol dependent, but not always and forever.

Using estar like this would convey a sense of changeability to a state of illness, boredom, sadness, or being a smoker too.

I am told estar is not often used to emphasise that substance use problems are shifting and dynamic, but doing so would be easy.

In English it is more difficult. A new word, an English estar, has only a very remote chance of catching on.

Emphasising change
Given introducing a new English verb is impossible we could still make better use of the language we already have.

“Now” is, perhaps, useful: I am now a smoker; I now have a cold; I am now alcohol dependent; I am now not alcohol dependent.

Yes, it is clunky, but perhaps we should accept some clunk if it means we avoid binding ourselves to things which we can change.

It offers the potential to soften and shift our outlook and allows, if we wish, our self-image to adapt to new circumstances.

Routinely acknowledging change is possible, in alcohol consumption, smoking and much else, can surely help us realise our choices. ■