Ten years ago, the organization Alcohol Change UK launched the initiative Dry January (Dry January), launching a challenge to British society to reduce alcohol consumption. In that country, which between 1960 and 2002 had seen the number of deaths from cirrhosis per inhabitant triple, the initiative became a success. After receiving government support in 2015, this year it is estimated that more than 8 million people will try to get through January without trying alcohol. In Spain, although the alcohol consumption of a part of the population continues to be excessive, the figures are not so worrying. In a recent study, it has been observed that between 1990 and 2019, the trend has been towards a slight decrease in consumption. However, on these dates of good intentions, dry January is beginning to find practitioners.
About its usefulness, some studies are optimistic. A survey from the University of Sussex in 2019 indicated that 59% of the participants drank less in June than before starting the challenge. At the other extreme, 11% had experienced a rebound effect and drank more than before. This happened mainly among those who had not managed to complete the 31 days without alcohol. As subjective results, only one month of alcohol abstinence served to improve quality of life, increase concentration, or improve sleep quality.
Ramón Bataller, head of the hepatology service at Hospital Clínic de Barcelona and spokesman for the Spanish Association for the Study of the Liver, believes that there are positive aspects of this type of campaign and some risks. “On the one hand, these campaigns online and apps that help you stay motivated and track can help keep you on purpose,” she says. And also, “after this time of great consumption that is Christmas, it is a way to take a step that will be beneficial for your health,” she adds.
As problems, Bataller, who wrote an article in the magazine Nature Analyzing the initiative, see two. “This can be seen as a trick to stop for a month, think that you are clean, and return to your usual habits in February,” she says. “There is a second problem and that is that this plan to stop drinking suddenly does not work for people with a significant addiction. Withdrawal is very dangerous, can even be fatal, and can make you sick very quickly. Let’s not forget that alcohol is one of the most addictive drugs out there,” she concludes.
Iñaki Galán, a researcher at the National Epidemiology Center (CNE) of the Carlos III Health Institute, affirms that “although people have been adhering to this type of campaign, global consumption has not decreased. It is one more measure, it is not a magic measure and the impact at the population level is low, although anything that means reducing consumption is good”. For the epidemiologist, an interesting point of this initiative may be that “people realize that when they try to stop drinking for a month it is difficult for them, that they have an addiction component that they had not identified.”
As with any lifestyle change, while the initial motivation to join a challenge can be helpful, success depends on an understanding of what makes change difficult and a supportive social environment. Regarding the first aspect, Bataller comments that it is important to “identify the underlying cause that may be leading you to alcohol.” “If you have chronic pain or anxiety and you drink to deal with those issues, you need to treat those causes as well in order to be successful, with behavioral therapies or supportive medications,” she explains.
Although the individual effort is not negligible, it is very difficult to change a habit such as alcohol consumption if it is socially normalized. Just as smoking on a plane or while consulting in a hospital was seen as an aberration, Galán believes that in order to achieve significant reductions in alcohol consumption, “it has to be denormalized.” “Through the prices and taxes on alcohol, it is possible to advance, for example, that drinking a beer is not even cheaper than drinking a soft drink. It is difficult, but successes have been achieved such as tobacco, which used to be smoked by 70% of the population and now just over 20%, or with the use of seat belts”, Galán exemplifies. In the case of traffic, punitive measures and information campaigns made possible an 80% reduction in road mortality in 30 years, from 9,344 in 1989 to 1,755 in 2019. Galán recognizes that alcohol is something very integrated in society, but denies that it is a necessity for social relations. “In Muslim countries, alcohol is not consumed and there is no problem,” he says.
In Spain, according to data from the Ministry of Health, 18.6% of people between the ages of 15 and 64 drink alcohol above the levels established as low risk and 5.2 carry out high risk consumption. Despite not being a panacea, a few million Spaniards can benefit, even temporarily, from trying to spend a month without the most widely consumed drug in almost the entire world.
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