Nearly 10 percent of American adults struggle with alcohol use disorder. Ninety percent will relapse at least once during treatment. If you’ve never struggled with alcoholism, it might be easy to imagine quitting is just a matter of willpower. But alcohol addiction rewires the brain, triggering crippling withdrawal and a relentless urge to drink.
Katie Herzog understands this reality intimately. For nearly 20 years, alcoholism took over her life, her relationships, and her career. She tried repeatedly to stop drinking, but it never lasted long. Then, in 2022, she came across an unorthodox treatment online.
It’s called the Sinclair Method (TSM), and it flips abstinence-based recovery on its head: Instead of never touching alcohol, you keep drinking, but first take an opioid blocker. The blocker stops you from feeling the pleasurable effects of alcohol, gradually extinguishing the brain’s craving for it. The results are striking: Nearly 80 percent of TSM participants in clinical trials cut their alcohol use dramatically.
Herzog is one of these success stories. Less than a year after starting TSM, she found her way to sobriety. Then she wrote a book about it. Drink Your Way Sober hits shelves on September 30. We’re thrilled to publish an exclusive excerpt today. —The Editors
I was a chronic drinker for over 20 years. At times, I was drinking between 10 and 12 drinks per day, every day. Short of rehab, I tried all the usual treatments to get better, and even a few less usual ones: Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), cognitive behavioral therapy, individual counseling, group counseling, yoga, cleanses, white-knuckling it through cravings and shakes. At one point, I tried swapping out my drinking habit for a cannabis one, which no drug counselor would recommend, but was definitely less dangerous. The worst thing that happened to me on weed was accidentally inhaling old bong water.
Some things worked, at least for a while. But even when I wasn’t drinking, the obsession with drinking was still there. I marked sober days on my calendar as though I were in prison, counting down each one until eventual relapse.
Each time I relapsed, the consequences got worse. I didn’t just have headaches; I had the shakes—and not just in my hands. My whole head would tremble, like a bobblehead on a car dash. I didn’t just have misadventures and funny stories; my liver hurt. At some point, I realized I was the last one at the party, there so long the party slowly withered away as my drinking buddies got careers or kids or cancer. I was alone with my bottle and miserable for it.
