Dry January
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Until today, I had never heard of "Dry January". I learned about it this morning from an article in The Harvard Gazette: "How to think about not drinking: For starters, treat Dry January as an experiment, not a punishment, addiction specialist says."
Remember Prohibition (in history; in the United States)? It didn't work, did it?
Swarthmore, Pennsylvania was decidedly a dry town when I moved here half a century ago, but then a different sort of people than Quakers started to move in, until now the borough is decidedly wet.
Before Prohibition, there was teetoalism (which got mixed up with tea-drinking). and that didn't work well either. And before that was alcohol abstinence, and that was unsuccessful too. What with alcoholic beverages flooding our grocery stores, I don't think there's a ghost of a chance that Dry January will have a significant impact on alcohol consumption in the United States.
One thing that puzzles me is why anti-smoking legislation has been so successful. Which is more harmful to the human body and human society — booze or tobacco?
Apparently, Dry January goes back at least to 2008 (source). This year it coincides with my personal New Year's resolution to cut out the daily dose of pastry, ice cream, and dollop of whipped cream to which I have been addicted for decades, and for which I now have proof positive of its ill effects on my health. This is one resolution that I am going to keep in perpetuity.
Selected reading
- "Brew" (11/25/21)
- "Two brews" (1/6/10) — Mair and McGovern
- "Let the Beer-Divider Be Chief!" (8/5/09)
Condign Harbinger said,
January 6, 2026 @ 10:47 am
The "war on drugs" is another such. As far as I'm concerned, all it did was make it difficult for my kids to access quality- controlled silly mindbenders in regulated doses. Ethanol (either 3-4% or so, or 10-13% or so depending on company) has always been my drug of choice.
Roscoe said,
January 6, 2026 @ 11:59 am
“Which is more harmful to the human body and human society — booze or tobacco?”
There’s no such thing as secondhand booze.
RP said,
January 6, 2026 @ 12:45 pm
@Roscoe
While it might be true that there's no such thing as 'second-hand booze', the negative effects of alcohol can absolutely accrue to other people instead of, or as well as, the drinker.
Drinking to excess can cause everything from drink-driving accidents, to drunken violence; the list is long. Part of recovery from alcoholism is dealing with, and maybe in some way making amends for, the absolute havoc that alcoholics invariably cause to those around them.
Clearly not all drinking is to excess, or in any way harmful. I just wanted to note that the second-hand thing is not quite so clear cut as 'never'.
Chester Draws said,
January 6, 2026 @ 1:24 pm
There's a lot of smoke blown about on this matter.
Nicotine is a very mild drug. Almost impossible to overdose and only slightly addictive. Basically very similar to caffeine.
Smoking is very bad for you. Even if it doesn't trigger things like lung cancer, it destroys your lungs over time. Combined with nicotine, it tends to be very hard to quit.
This is why nicotine patches are not an issue — the harm caused by them is basically zero. Vaping is only slightly worse than patches (provided it is legal — if it is prohibited then illegal products enter the market, and some of those have serious health issues).
It would help if later commenters pleased distinguished between smoking and nicotine. They are not the same thing.
That and remembering that prohibition doesn't work.
Jenny Chu said,
January 6, 2026 @ 7:08 pm
@Roscoe As the actress Béatrice Dalle once said, "Un homme qui a bu est plus dangereux qu'un homme qui a fumé."
Terry K. said,
January 6, 2026 @ 7:37 pm
Alcohol has it's dangers, but it does not cause the room in which people use it to be nauseously gross and bad for one's health.
Michael Vnuk said,
January 6, 2026 @ 10:44 pm
Here in Australia, I had only heard of 'Dry July', which raises money for cancer support organisations by people abstaining from alcohol. Wikipedia says that Dry January is run in February in some countries as 'Dry February'. Another similar campaign, again according to Wikipedia, is 'Sober October' or 'Ocsober'.
Tom Dawkes said,
January 7, 2026 @ 2:12 am
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_January and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4684010/
David Morris said,
January 7, 2026 @ 2:29 am
A difference between prohibition and initiatives like Dry (Month) is that prohibition is legally enacted and enforced and that initiatives are voluntary self-discipline.
Richard Hershberger said,
January 7, 2026 @ 5:09 am
Back in the 1990s, when discussions were getting going about banning smoking in bars and restaurants, the owners swore that a ban would kill their businesses. They knew their patrons, and these patrons were all either smokers or OK with being around smokers. Libertarian wankers, in the meantime, lectured us patiently, like speaking to particularly dull children, that there was no market for smoke-free establishments, because were there one, free-market pixie dust would have already provided them to us.
Then the bans went through anyway, and lo and behold it turned out there were innumerable people who enjoyed going out to eat and drink, but not if this entailed the smell of stale tobacco smoke. At the same time, the smokers, or at least some substantial fraction of them, still wanted to go out to eat and drink, even if they had to step outside for their smoke. What about that free-market pixie dust? Well, libertarian wankers are not, as a group, overly prone to letting reality interfere with theory. The bars and restaurants did just fine.
Initially some bars were tempted to let their patrons cheat on this, but eventually they figured out that non-smokers were a valuable market that was being turned away by the cheating. Go forward a few years and you have a social consensus that of course you don't smoke inside a bar or restaurant: everyone knows this! This correlated with a general decline in smoking. I could only speculate about any causation here.
Victor Mair said,
January 7, 2026 @ 9:06 am
Already fifteen or twenty years ago, maybe longer, I was in Finland or somewhere else in the dead of winter, and it was VERY COLD. I was astonished that scores of people were standing outside a restaurant / bar smoking.
Victor Mair said,
January 7, 2026 @ 9:14 am
When I came to Penn in 1979, one of my colleagues was fervently in favor of smoker's rights. In those days, some professors even smoked in the classroom.
Fast forward ten years, that same professor became a militant anti-smoker. They (avoiding mention of the gender) would shout at you if you dared light up a cigarette inside of any building.
Pamela said,
January 7, 2026 @ 10:16 am
This seems a bit apples and oranges. Alcohol in some form or other has been part of virtually all human societies and cultures for tens of thousands of years, at a minimum. It has had many applications, and in the context of religious ritual or intermittent social exchange might be compulsory, or close to it. But habitual drunkenness or drinking to the extent of socially disruptive or destructive behavior has a long history of being forbidden, punished, or repudiated in al of these cultures, even to be associated with major moral defects or demonic possession. Smoking has a very long history in the Americas, where it had a similar profile to restricted alcohol drinking in many other cultures. But when transferred to England in the sixteenth century, where it had recreational applications exclusively (with virtually no constraints), it immediately excited horror in observers. However addictive nicotine is, without the addiction is is difficult to understand how such a viscerally repulsive activity, which has such a damaging effect (medically and just plain old appeal) on the individuals indulging in it, could ever have taken on the dimensions it did as a practice and as a huge business. People can drink moderately without becoming physically repulsive or ruining the interior environment for other people. Smoking has a very different effect. I'm not sure that outside the cateory of very common drugs these practices or substances have much that is comparable.
DJL said,
January 8, 2026 @ 5:15 am
Dry January has been a thing in the UK for some time now, but I don't understand the references to Prohibition and similar – it has nothing to do with that, it's just about people trying to be healthier after the holidays, and maybe with a more lasting effect.
Adam F said,
January 8, 2026 @ 1:39 pm
Jello Biafra said "For every prohibition, you also create an Underground."
Eric B said,
January 10, 2026 @ 1:00 am
A much younger person than I told me last week that her cohort is practicing reduced drinking this month, but not embracing total abstinence. The phrase they are apparently turning to is "Damp January."
Philip Taylor said,
January 10, 2026 @ 2:31 pm
And if they were to practice significantly reduced drinking, would they then call it "Moist January" ?!
SlideSF said,
January 10, 2026 @ 6:10 pm
I have been aware of, and sometimes practiced Dry January, since the early 1990s. It was especially popular with people who worked in the hospitality industry, after a month plus of overindulging in alcohol at work and with friends outside of work. Over the decades I have seen the custom grow increasingly, until it eventually became "a thing". Now it seems everyone is doing it. So much so that, coupled with the general tendency of the younger generations to drink less alcohol, the month of January sees significant dropoffs in sales at bars and restaurants with bars. Whereas previously December holiday-time offered a significant bump in sales, it is now offset (or even more than offset) by a corresponding slump in January.
To my knowledge, Dry January never referred to a prohibition or injunction against alcohol, but rather was a self-imposed limitation, along the lines of (and dovetailing nicely into) a New Years Resolution. Perhaps that has changed now, and the peer pressure to conform is too great for some to withstand.
Tom Dawkes said,
January 15, 2026 @ 2:47 pm
I had an email from Amazon.it a couple of days ago.
A picture of Marini Vibrante
È iniziato il Dry January!
Fai scorta ora delle tue bevande analcoliche preferite.
That is "Dry January has begun!
Stock up on your favorite soft drinks now."
Michael said,
January 15, 2026 @ 7:58 pm
While I, too, first heard the term relatively recently, I have actually been practicing it for decades. I first started when a friend posited the curious theory (which I no longer give credence), that the difference between a "user" of a given drug and an "addict" was that "users" regularly went through periods of "not using." At that time, I set myself a goal of not less than five days of "not using" and as much longer as felt right. I quit for about 17 days. Later, I decided that New Years and my birthday (which is in Summer) are the two dates on which I was most likely to over-indulge, and thus a month off after either might be healthy. I've since expanded "Dry January" to include all of February (which is after all the shortest month), and I rather enjoy the breaks – as well as the day I can once again pour out a pint of my favorite microbrew.