CSU's The Audit

INTRO: The trend of abstaining from drinking at the beginning of a new year didn’t start with Dry January. The movement has roots going back to 1942 in Finland, where “Sober January” was part of the war effort against the Soviet Union. Even further back in the 1800s, the Temperance Movement promoted complete abstinence from consuming alcohol. And from 1920 to 1933 the Prohibition Era meant the U.S. had a nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages.

Even still, alcohol enjoys a conflicted place in our society. Just last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced newly updated guidelines on drinking that walk back a more than 40-year standard on what constitutes moderate drinking.

Colorado State University’s David Korostyshevsky explores the history of drug and alcohol addiction. His work delves into the evolution of science and medicine, as well as legal and disability history, to uncover how mental health, addiction, legal rights and citizenship intersect over time.

Today I’m speaking with Korostyshevsky about the origins of “sober living” movements like Dry January, our continued complicated relationship with alcohol and whether we might be entering the next anti-alcohol era.

HOST: Can you start by giving a brief history of Dry January? Where did the idea originate and how has it evolved over the years?

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: The idea of Dry January, especially as a challenge that one might undertake to stop drinking for a month after the holiday season, is actually fairly new.

Dry January first started in 2011. A runner in the U.K. by the name of Emily Robinson had signed up for her first half-marathon and realized that right in the middle of all of her training, that was going to be the holiday season where she was going to do her customary drinking and food consumption that we tend to do during the holidays. She had an idea that in order to help her training maybe she would abstain from alcohol for the month of January, and she reported that she noticed a tremendous increase in her performance and her overall health and also non-running related benefits.

The following year she joined a group called Alcohol Change UK and the rest, as they say, is history. Dry January as a campaign was born. Since then, in the last just over 10 years or so, Dry January has become more of a global phenomenon where more people are starting to realize that cutting out alcohol even just for a month might be beneficial for them. By 2019, they launched an app to help people succeed in Dry January. And Alcohol Change UK reports that in 2025, they had over 200,000 people officially take part in the challenge. And I think we know that if we look at social media, we can see that there's all kinds of unofficial participation as well.

HOST: Why do you think Dry January gained so much popularity, especially in the last few years? Is this part of a larger cultural shift?

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: I think in some ways Dry January is part of a cultural shift in terms of how people, especially younger people, view alcohol and its effects on their health. But at the same time, I think Dry January in many ways is a reappearance of many ideas about alcohol and whether it's harmful and what our relationship to alcohol ought to be. Ideas that have been around for at least several hundred years.

HOST: Let's talk a little bit about that history, because it does go back to the, I'm thinking about the Temperance Movement, Prohibition, eras where we've had outright bans on alcohol.

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: Perhaps I'll go even farther back and start with humanity's relationship with alcohol, going maybe more to the beginnings. Alcohol has been around with the human experience since before what we might even think of as history. For a long time, there was a hypothesis that perhaps beer happened before bread.

But truly, it doesn't really matter which came first. What matters is that the idea of beer and bread all develop around the same time, and they predate sedentary agricultural civilizations, at least as best as archeologists can tell. Some have argued that alcohol has even been a substance that plays a vital role in human evolution because it fosters the breaking down of social boundaries. It fosters social bonding. And indeed, we see that in pre-modern cultures. The idea of feasting, which always accompanied eating and drinking, was an important critical part of how societies formed bonds. Relationships, indebtedness, government, all those things really happened at these kinds of events.

As you get into civilization, people realize that there are also some problems with drinking. Historically these problems were seen as a problem of individual and personal choice because for most of history, we didn't quite understand that there was this substance, alcohol, inside of these drinks that is what caused the reaction. That comes much later. Most of the substances that people imbibed were lower alcoholic content – beer and wine. They were not products of commercial or industrial production, so they were not readily available. And in general, there was a lot less drinking overall for an average person, probably than what we would have today.

Flash forward to what we historians call the early modern period, starting around European expansion across the Atlantic Route around 1500. In the 1500s and 1600s in England, especially, you see a commercialization of ale production and ale houses becoming the site of consumption outside the home. Once distillation escapes the alchemist's laboratory and becomes something that people commonly know how to do in the 1600s, then you have distilled liquor proliferating and then you have more modern drinking establishments, what we would think of as bars where you might buy liquor. As you have cities like London growing, and in the United States later places like Philadelphia and New York, a lot of drinking going on in these places by more common people. This leads to new kinds of concerns. Liquor is intoxicating people really quickly. It leads to concerns about poor underclasses, about urban disorder, even political disorder, that might rise from these types of activities in a city.

HOST: So, it kind of becomes an evil entity?

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: Or the evil drink, yeah. Then in 1811 a scientist in England discovers that alcohol exists as a discrete chemical substance in beer and wine, and that liquor is just a more concentrated extracted form of it. That becomes something that temperance reformers really pick up on.

In the history of the United States the English tradition is especially important. In Western European and U.S. history alcohol becomes a big part of society. Once it becomes commercialized, it's readily available. People can basically buy it rather than having to make it themselves. In the United States, that leads to the temperance movement. There's also a temperance movement in the U.K. and across Europe.

The ways in which alcohol proliferates through all aspects of society in the early modern period leads to reactions against its use. In the United States, temperance reform really begins right when the country forms. Benjamin Rush, who is an early American physician and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, writes the first American text about the dangers of alcohol.

But he's still writing about beverages that intoxicate more generally. He doesn't know yet that alcohol exists in all of them. He thinks some are probably better than others, and he's really speaking against liquor. In 1811, a scientist in England discovers that alcohol exists as a discrete substance that causes intoxication in beer, wine and liquor. And as early American temperance reformers start to build a movement, they really seize on this idea.

They decide that, whereas before people were maybe leery about how much beer and wine you drank and maybe you shouldn't drink liquor, unless as a medicine, at all. Now because temperance reformers understand that alcohol exists in all these beverages, they develop this idea of total abstinence. Total abstinence actually comes from a temperance reformer in the U.K., but it is American temperance reforms that really seize on it, and as they start to condemn alcohol for causing all these problems with drunkenness including health effects, they start to think that perhaps the only solution is prohibition. This is really the origin of prohibition, the realization that the substance exists in all these things. One's not better than the other.

By the second half of the 1800s, as temperance reformers worked to create prohibition, they only succeed mostly in a patchwork of local and state jurisdictions, and often these fail. But as they work towards prohibition, they develop an idea that even the first drop will lead to habituation and the demise of the drinker.

Prohibition does ultimately succeed by 1920 when it goes into effect, in part because the Anti-Saloon League was a very effective political pressure organization that basically lobbied against any candidate who didn't support prohibition. But by the time prohibition passes, the country now is very different. This is after World War I, and that kind of leads into the 20th century. Of course, prohibition is untenable. It ultimately collapses by 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression. That really sets up the system of alcohol regulation that we have to this day in the United States.

Ultimately, in a social/cultural sense, alcohol enjoys a very kind of contested dual status in American culture and society. On the one hand, we promote it. We have commercials on TV constantly about alcoholic beverages. There are bars everywhere. You can see alcohol of all kinds at the grocery store. There are liquor stores in a lot of strip malls. It's very available. On the other hand, we understand that it might be harmful. Television shows depict drinking that is harmful. There's this attitude of drink it unless you have a problem with it, or if you have a problem with it, it's still kind of your fault. Also, we're starting to understand that alcohol is a public health problem and that there are more structural components to why some people might have more problems with it than others.

HOST: And it seems to continue that route. We have the Dry January movement, but also, we've just seen the Department of Health and Human Services walk back a more than 40-year-old standard that Americans should limit themselves to one or two alcoholic drinks a day. The updated guidelines only state that they should consume "less" alcohol. They don't give an actual number anymore. They've also removed much of the conversation linking alcohol to cancer.

Historically, how have governments and institutions influenced alcohol consumption and attitudes towards drinking?

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: The way in which governments primarily affect cultural and social attitudes about drinking is really through the ways in which government supports public health initiatives.

Obviously, prohibition was a government action by criminalizing the manufacture, sale and possession of alcohol essentially. That caused people to definitely drink less, often just because they couldn't access alcohol anymore. There are ways in which governments can influence drinking levels like that, but what does that actually do about what people think about alcohol? Certainly, the person who can't get it but still wants it hasn't really changed their mind.

Public health efforts, on the other hand, which are a much more recent way to think about alcohol, are probably much more effective. Dry January probably falls into that type of category. But what's really interesting is that this is the effort of an individual person partnering with a nonprofit to create a marketing campaign around a self-started initiative. The way that governments work through public health to affect the way that people think about alcohol is probably through the kinds of guidelines that are issued by government agencies, like for example, saying you should drink this many drinks per day or per week, or taking those guidelines away.

One of the biggest reasons why Dry January has really taken off is probably because of the last 10 years of public health voices talking about alcohol being a carcinogen and talking about how, as the World Health Organization also recently stated, there is no safe level. You also have a lot of younger people growing up, realizing that they have experienced, perhaps, harmful alcohol use in their own family and friends. This is actually something I hear a lot directly from my own students who are interested in this topic when I teach classes about it.

I've also seen explanations of why younger people might be drinking less. In addition to absorbing these public health messages, the cost of living has gone up, and going out costs more. People are also opting out of drinking for economic reasons. It's probably a combination of all these things, but since 2020, even as the global pandemic caused overall rises in drinking in some segments of the population, among younger people, alcohol consumption continues dropping and some say is at an all-time low.

In August of 2025, Gallup published a study that says that alcohol consumption has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in nearly 90-year-trend.

HOST: Are we seeing maybe the – I don't want to say the end of alcohol, but – are we seeing it go the way of smoking where it's become something that's almost demonized?

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: I don't think that the demonization itself is new. What I think is new is that public health messages are being absorbed about alcohol. Temperance reformers had a similar thought. They wanted to convince people that drinking was bad for them, primarily morally. But it was morally bad because it also destroyed your health, and it destroyed your ability to make an income and to perform your basic social roles that were expected of you.

They wanted to convince people not to drink in the first place by convincing them that alcohol was bad. In that sense, you see a similar line of reasoning going on, especially with Dry January, where people are saying, definitely, we should drink less or not drink at all.

One of the things that I think is interesting about Dry January though is that the people who support Dry January and who want to participate in it are not necessarily anti-drinking. What they want to do is to consciously question their relationship with alcohol, and to figure out why they drink and how they drink.

Some studies have shown that even people who fail to fully abstain in Dry January still have an altered relationship with alcohol throughout the rest of the year, including drinking less frequently or drinking less. These people aren't necessarily anti-drinking; they just want to drink less, or at least to know why they're drinking. That's something that temperance reformers probably would have ultimately supported.

What's really interesting about public health guidelines or challenges like Dry January that focus around the number of drinks, the quantity of alcohol that you're drinking, and the frequency with which you're drinking it, is also a kind of a restatement of concerns that have been around for a very long time.

Part of what I'm finding in my research, for example, is in the 1800s courts had a really difficult time figuring out who had a problem and who didn't. The courts, the lawyers and the doctors tried to create numerical standards for how much, how often, and what kind of alcohol was a problem. But they quickly found that they couldn't for a variety of reasons. The chief reason was that alcohol affects everyone very differently. This issue is still very much a part of conversations about challenges like Dry January where people want to drink less frequently and maybe even change the kind of alcohol that they're drinking.

HOST: It's like eggs. One day we're told they're good for us, then they're bad, then they're good again. It all depends on who you're listening to. It depends on what situation you're looking at.

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: It's important to recognize that ideas about alcohol, especially modern scientific ideas, are still culturally and socially embedded. For example, critics of the World Health Organization's There Is No Safe Limit research point out that the research is biased in favor of only finding harm, and that it does not recognize that people exist in social and cultural contexts and that there are long-standing historical ways in which alcohol promotes sociability and social bonding among groups. These critics say that the data doesn't account for those types of benefits that might come from alcohol.

There's also contested medical data about whether alcohol might be bad for you or good for you, again, depending on the type or how much. One or two glasses of wine is not the same thing as one or two glasses of liquor, perhaps. You have people armed with scientific studies on both sides of that debate. That still leaves us in a very “temperance movement” kind of way. It leaves it to us, as individuals, to figure out again what our relationship with alcohol is. Dry January really fulfills that for people who want to do it just on a personal level and to think about it themselves, influenced as they are by all of the messaging from both sides.

One of the other interesting things about Dry January is the idea that these new tools like apps are helping people to stay connected and to stay motivated. Temperance reformers were not a monolithic group; some elite temperance reformers, the well-to-do educated doctors and clergymen and lawyers of the day, didn't think that drunkards really were redeemable.

Dry January doesn't think of you as a drunkard, just as a drinker, but when they did think of that person who was drinking as a drunkard, that person was unsavable. They were trying to convince everyone else not to drink. The people that wanted to help themselves as drinkers, that movement called the Washingtonian Movement in the 1840s, came from amongst former drinkers themselves who created essentially a support group for fellow drinkers to drink less or to stop drinking if they wanted to.

In that sense, Dry January is a kind of a self-started motivating, self-help group almost, where if you really want to be a part of it, you can get this app and get the motivating messages and stay in touch with other people and have this shared collective experience so that you don't feel like you're on your own. That bears a strong resemblance to the Quitting Tobacco movements.

Just going back to what you asked about, whether this is the end of alcohol or not, I don't think it's the end of alcohol. But efforts by the World Health Organization to label alcohol as a carcinogen resemble, for some, that alcohol might be going the way of tobacco. Tobacco, of course, isn't gone. In some ways, tobacco has morphed into new products like vapes, which continue to cause public health concerns. So, I don't think alcohol is going to go away, but we might start thinking about it collectively more like tobacco in terms of less social acceptance and more recognition that it causes harm.

HOST: We've talked a lot about the view of alcohol use as maybe a moral failing or as a health impact, but when did we start seeing it as a disease, as an actual addiction?

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: Alcohol has always been viewed in the context of personal choice, and it has always been understood to have physical effects on the body and impacts on your health. But the switch to thinking about alcohol and alcoholism as being medical problems and that alcoholism might be a disease that could be addressed through a medical intervention really starts in the 1800s.

Historians have located the beginning of that process really to the 1880s and later. The 1880's was a period in which medical professionals really started to think about what they called inebriety and later alcoholism as an actual category of disease that they could intervene in a clinical setting, specifically in insane or inebrium asylums. In my research, I pushed that date a little bit back. I really think it begins in earnest with that discovery of alcohol.

Once alcohol is recognized as a discrete chemical substance that's in all these drinks, it not only gives a piece of armament to the temperance movement to move towards prohibition, but it also gives medical professionals and other scientists new questions about the physical impacts of alcohol on the body. Those kinds of ideas really lead towards later developments about it actually as a disease. That trend of thinking of alcohol as something that might cause a disease called alcoholism really persists through the 20th century as other drugs become criminalized while alcohol escapes through the repeal of prohibition. Yet, at the same time, even as the 20th century is in many ways the height of thinking about alcoholism, that element of personal choice and responsibility never really go away.

The reason it takes so long from 1811 to the 1880s to start to think about inebriety as a disease, is because of this constant baggage pulling back medical ideas about how it's still this guy's choice to drink in the first place. Alcoholism is not like insanity in the sense that insanity is hard to figure out what causes it. Alcoholism might be like insanity. But we know for sure it was the alcohol that caused it, and so in that sense it keeps putting the burden of responsibility on the person who is also then the sufferer.

As alcoholism undergoes more sustained medicalization from the 1880s onward, it doesn't mean that doctors don't necessarily stop judging their patients. There's always this moral personal responsibility baggage that goes along with so-called alcoholics who are now considered patients by certain medical professionals. They still see them as kind of failed people even as they see them as patients. That element of personal responsibility never really goes away in medicine.

By the time you get to challenges like Dry January, you see individuals who are drinkers themselves fully embracing the medical explanation that alcohol is bad for you and they also don't see themselves necessarily as patients or as drunkards who are in need of recovery. These people are actually doing their own kind of moral suasion.

Trends like Dry January, the rise of mocktails, and people's general curiosity about sobriety is part of a broader trend in which classical temperance, small "t" temperance, meaning the idea that we should moderate our intake of not just intoxicating substances, but food in general, and perhaps activities that we engage in, has always happened in cycles. There have always been periods of heightened consumption and then backlash to that consumption.

Trends like Dry January represent a new cycle of backlash against alcohol based on some of the public health messaging. And people ultimately see effects in their own life. If people did Dry January and did not see a positive benefit, they wouldn't necessarily want to keep doing it. It's also important that they're not telling everyone that they should do Dry January or that alcohol should be limited or prohibited. Dry January fits into that part of temperance trends that really are very personal and very different. Dry January is very different from other ways in which governments and other institutions affect public opinion about alcohol, such as prohibition or public health messaging or public health policy.

HOST: I was also thinking about the idea of social media and that influence as well. That's also a big part of the Dry January movement, going on Facebook and saying, "I'm doing Dry January." You kind of hold yourself accountable, but you also see your friends doing it, as well.

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: This is really another way in which what's old is new again. Temperance reformers in the 1820s, '30s and '40s were really into taking the Temperance Pledge. The pledge was something that was a public undertaking. You did it with other people who were also taking the pledge, you did it your friends, you signed a piece of paper. Very much like going on a website and signing up or downloading an app and committing to something. It was a collective experience, and it was partially meant to be a kind of a moral support group to help each other to actually fulfill that pledge.

HOST: Do you think Dry January is an effective tool for individuals to reassess their relationship with alcohol, or are there limitations to this kind of initiative?

When we think about the effectiveness of an initiative like Dry January, I think we have to ask effective for whom? If you're an individual who wants to reconfigure your relationship with alcohol, maybe Dry January is very effective for you, especially since there's now an app and you can stay in touch with other people and get that moral support to stay motivated.

If you are a temperance-minded reformer or a public health official who thinks that there is no safe amount of alcohol and you want to actually reduce alcohol consumption more broadly, perhaps it's not as effective. Maybe it's more limited because if you're a drinker who is going to look down your nose at Dry January because you want to keep drinking, to a temperance-minded public health official, that person's just not going to do Dry January. It really just depends on who it's being put into use for.

Certainly, Dry January is not effective for everyone. Just as research shows that Dry January might be effective for some people, even if they don't fully complete it, there's also research that shows it's not. Again, the science about stuff like this seems to be just as contested as anything else in the alcohol conversation.

HOST: Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It was fascinating to talk with you about this.

KOROSTYSHEVSKY: Thank you!

OUTRO: That was CSU history instructor David Korostyshevsky talking about the history of drug and alcohol addiction and its relationship to dry January. I'm your host, Stacy Nick, and you're listening to CSU's The Audit.