‘Dry Harder’: French government urged to openly back booze-free January

The government should openly support an alcohol-free January campaign, better known as ‘Dry January’, 48 addiction specialists wrote in a letter to Health Minister Aurélien Rousseau, published by Le Parisien and Franceinfo on Tuesday.

“It’s a positive operation that involves everyone, as part of a collective movement, questioning the place alcohol plays in [our] lives and taking up the challenge of not consuming alcohol during this period,” the letter reads.

‘Dry January’, first coined in 2014 by British NGO Alcohol Change UK, involves going teetotal for the first month of the year.

According to the doctors’ letter, “confidence in the government to pursue a coherent and committed policy [against alcoholism] has been seriously undermined. Restoring this confidence can only be achieved through strong measures in terms of content and symbolic impact”.

The document is written with clear undertones of anger after several anti-alcohol campaigns were cancelled in France in recent years.

In September, the government decided at the last minute not to broadcast a campaign to limit alcohol consumption during the Rugby World Cup, following pressure from the French wine lobby, according to several NGOs.

The campaign was also cancelled days before the government was due to launch the Dry campaign for January 2019, with critics saying French President Emmanuel Macron was favouring the French wine lobby against the interests of consumers.

The benefits of a month without alcohol “have been proven in countries that have been running similar campaigns for many years, notably the UK,” the doctors said in the letter.

Each year, France records more than 40,000 alcohol-related deaths, official statistics show.

[Edited by Théo Bourgery-Gonse]

(Clara Bauer-Babef | Euractiv.fr)