Did you know there are medications available that can help reduce the craving to use? Individuals have reported that the use of these medications can cause them to lose interest in alcohol, even while drinking. These medications are therefore helpful for both achieving abstinence from alcohol or learning to use alcohol in moderation, whatever your goal might be. They are unlike antabuse, which makes you violently ill. Naltrexone can be taken as a low-cost, generic pill. As such, it can either be taken daily or just when you are planning to go drink. Either way, it has proven to be effective in reducing the urge to drink. If you think you need something that doesn’t require you to remember to take a pill it can also be taken as a Vivitrol shot, which can last up to 30 days at a time. Camprol is another medication that can be used to reduce craving.
Read the experience of Gabrielle Glaser, a reporter with the Atlantic, who did a self-experiment with Naltrexone. “The first night, I took a [naltrexone] pill at 6:30. An hour later, I sipped a glass of wine and felt almost nothing—no calming effect, none of the warm contentment that usually signals the end of my workday and the beginning of a relaxing evening. I finished the glass and poured a second. By the end of dinner, I looked up to see that I had barely touched it. I had never found wine so uninteresting. Was this a placebo effect? Possibly. But so it went. On the third night, at a restaurant where my husband and I split a bottle of wine, the waitress came to refill his glass twice; mine, not once. That had never happened before, except when I was pregnant. At the end of 10 days, I found I no longer looked forward to a glass of wine with dinner. (Interestingly, I also found myself feeling full much quicker than normal, and I lost two pounds. In Europe, an opioid antagonist is being tested on binge eaters.)”
Please see us if you think this approach to an alcohol use problem might be helpful for you.
