Will this be one of your – good – resolutions for 2025? Now in its sixth French edition, Dry January takes place once again without government support. Launched in 2013 in the United Kingdom by the organization Alcohol Change UK and introduced to France in 2020, this initiative aims to encourage people to take a month-long break and question their consumption and relationship with alcohol. How many drinks do I have a day? Why? How do I deal with social pressure to drink? And so on.
When it was launched in France at the end of 2019, the government was initially supposed to support the initiative. “To everyone’s surprise, only a few months before the campaign’s launch, we were told that everything was off,” said researcher Mickael Naassila, president of the French Society of Alcohol Studies, in his new book J’arrête de boire sans devenir chiant (“I quit drinking without becoming boring”). “At issue is a ‘Jovian’ decision. […] Although Santé Publique France [France’s public health body] had prepared a new version of this campaign, the government pulled the plug, leaving organizations to run the scheme on their own.”
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