Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) – and Substance Use Disorders in general – are men’s issues because many more men than women suffer from them. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in 2024 that an estimated 400 million people, or 7% of the world’s population aged 15 years and older, lived with alcohol use disorders. The alcohol-attributable mortality was heaviest among men, accounting for two million deaths annually compared to 600,000 deaths among women, in 2019. The WHO report is here.

After years as a heavy drinker, I gave up alcohol in September 2025 after taking Antabuse (disulfiram), and I haven’t wanted to drink alcohol since. Antabuse is the fastest and most effective route to alcohol abstinence for problem drinkers, but for a variety of reasons is rarely prescribed by doctors presented with patients with drinking problem.

Paul Elam was a substance abuse counsellor for 30 years. He and I co-wrote the book ANTABUSE: The one-step program for alcohol abstinence. Available only through Amazon, the Kindle edition is available to order here, the paperback edition here. We recorded a discussion about AUD and abstinence, here (video, 36:59).

I have a website dedicated to AUD, Men Stop Drinking. 

I recently undertook two objectives:

• to support individual men with drinking problems, wishing to become abstinent. They need to email me in the first instance (mike@j4mb.org.uk) and I shall not charge for my time helping them.
• to engage with individuals and organisations that should be encouraging doctors and others to prescribe Antabuse to problem drinkers. They include NICE, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which doesn’t currently offer guidance on AUD, and the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS).

The IAS produced the report Now you see it, now you don’t (how alcohol industry interference made marketing restrictions disappear from the 10 Year Health Plan in England). From the link:

“In July 2025, the UK Government published its 10 Year Health Plan for England. Despite a media leak and subsequent Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) statement indicating that the Plan would contain alcohol marketing restrictions, these did not appear in the final document.

Alcohol industry influence has been identified as a major barrier to the introduction of effective policies to reduce alcohol harm. We were therefore keen to understand to what degree the removal of marketing restrictions from the 10 Year Health Plan might have been a result of commercial influence. To investigate further, we made freedom of information (FOI) requests to different UK Government departments for correspondence with the alcohol industry in the month ahead of the Plan’s release.

From the documents we received, we can demonstrate:

The alcohol industry targeted the Health Secretary and DHSC over potential marketing restrictions – This is a clear example of alcohol companies seeking to interfere with health policy and the NHS.

Other Government departments were leveraged to lobby DHSC on behalf of the alcohol industry – The documents we received show that alcohol companies and industry-funded organisations wrote to the Department for Business & Trade, the Department for Culture, Media & Sport and HM Treasury, encouraging them to put pressure on DHSC to drop the planned marketing restriction policy.

Alcohol industry actors likely coordinated their approach – The existence of joint letters, the timing of correspondence and striking similarities in the content of the letters all suggest a coordinated campaign.

Alcohol industry correspondence contained a range of well-known arguments and rhetorical strategies used by alcohol, tobacco, unhealthy food and drink and fossil-fuel companies, among others – These included: cherry-picking data about alcohol harm trends and the evidence base for restrictions; arguing (contrary to the evidence) that self-regulation is effective; making catastrophic economic claims; arguing that the alcohol industry is an appropriate partner in reducing harm (despite evidence that this is ineffective and even harmful); and stating (contrary to the evidence) that advertising does not increase drinking and benefits society. Specific arguments used are outlined and compared to authoritative sources of evidence and found to be misleading in our full report.”

The full report can be downloaded from the link.

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