To Fight Alcohol Addiction, We Need More Than a Dry January

In 1942, the Finnish government, engaged in a bitter struggle against the Soviet Union, came up with a novel idea to keep its people in fighting shape: For one month, it asked the nation’s entire adult population to abstain from drinking. Which month? That was the easy part: January, the very beginning of the year, and a time of resolutions and challenges, and change.

Some seven decades later, a British woman named Emily Robinson kicked off her new year by signing up for a half marathon. The race was scheduled for February, so she took a page from the history books and decided to try going without booze for a month. The results were terrific: Robinson lost weight, slept better, and aced her run. Thus was born Dry January, an initiative that inspires hundreds of thousands of people around the world to say “no thanks” to liquor for 31 days.

And that’s a blessing: Studies have repeatedly shown that going dry for January can lead to increased energy, better heart health, a drop in liver inflammation, a trimmer waistline, and even clearer skin. The only drawback to this approach is that Dry January is inevitably followed by No-Longer-Dry February, with too many people resuming their bad habits once the new year kicks into gear.

Which, alas, is a problem. An estimated 95,000 Americans die each year from alcohol-related causes, or roughly twice as many as die from gun violence, making alcohol the third-leading preventable cause of death, after smoking and a poor diet. And if that’s not reason enough to take binge drinking very seriously, studies also show that alcohol misuse cost the U.S. $249 billion in 2010, the last year for which we have good data. That’s roughly $800 per person, which means that drinking too much is costing each and every one of us the price of a brand-new iPhone each year.

Part of the problem is that alcohol is an attractive drug that offers relaxation and sociability. It's deeply tied to our social rituals and can be the first thing we reach for when we need to "unwind" from a hard day. To put it bluntly: People don’t want to give up the felt benefits of alcohol, even if it's unhealthy. All the attention paid to the health risks of consuming even the slightest amount of alcohol is falling on deaf ears. Alcohol is, simply put, too much a part of the fabric of our social dynamics to be so easily set aside.

It's time, then, we take this problem seriously, and just one dry month a year, alas, isn’t going to do. How to combat alcohol abuse, then? I’m happy to report that good news may be coming from an unexpected direction: psychedelics.

Research on psychedelics and alcohol dependence

Last summer, for example, a team of researchers at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine conducted a study involving 93 adults suffering from alcohol dependence, giving some a placebo and others two doses of psilocybin. Within eight months, those who received the psychedelic substance reduced heavy drinking by a whopping 83 percent, while their peers in the control group registered a much less dramatic decrease.

Studies like this one are showing the immense promise of using psychedelics to combat alcoholism, but there’s much we still need to research and understand about how to offer optimal cures with long-term effects and no harm. Late last year, for example, the company I head, Clearmind Medicine, announced a partnership with Israel’s IMCA Medical Center to test a new, patented psychedelic compound called MEAI to treat alcohol use disorder, or AUD.

We’re hardly alone in our optimism and enthusiasm: Realizing both the immense problem and the tremendous potential of psychedelics, the VA announced last year that it will undo a six-decade hiatus on researching the use of psychedelics to cure a vast array of disorders exhibited by veterans, and is now participating in at least five trials in New York, California, and Oregon.

Alcoholism, in particular, seems a good candidate for psychedelic therapeutics: whereas partaking in a Dry January requires immense willpower and self-control—try turning down that glass of red wine when all of your friends are enjoying their meal and clinking glasses—psychedelics have the potential to literally rewire your brain, creating new neural connections that can help calm your brain for long enough to enable individuals not only to make better choices but also to grapple, through therapy, with the reasons that might’ve led them to binge drinking in the first place.

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And that, not a mere month’s break, is the sort of long-term solution we need to address the mounting problem that is alcohol abuse. To be sure, challenges abound, from questions of regulation to overcoming patients’ and physicians’ concerns about combatting one form of addiction with a substance too often associated with another. But modern science, hallelujah, has given us some major breakthroughs in safe and potentially effective psychedelic-based therapies, so this January, let us vow not only to put that stein down but also to look for research and cure from an unexpected direction.