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During the pandemic, many of us acquired habits that made perfect sense inside that peculiar crucible and rather less sense once we emerged from it. To be completely transparent, my own drinking increased. There was no dramatic descent, merely an expansion: another glass of wine with dinner, a bourbon to mark the end of a day whose beginning and middle had occurred in the same home office. My wife and I took up ping-pong and became enthusiastic amateur mixologists; while shops closed, online alcohol-delivery services obligingly kept our bar stocked. With restaurants shuttered, travel suspended and commuting summarily curtailed, alcohol became both diversion and punctuation. It gave evenings a little brio when the calendar had otherwise gone mute.
Fast-forward a few years. At the start of 2026, in a fit of optimism for which I can offer no cogent explanation, I resolved to get into the best physical condition of my life. I began exercising with greater seriousness, paying closer attention to what I ate and, almost as an experiment, largely stopped drinking. This was neither a criticism of alcohol nor a polemic against those who enjoy it. A good bottle of wine remains an illecebrous proposition, and I have no intention of becoming the dinner companion who regards someone else’s cabernet as a moral failing. Alcohol simply ceased to serve me. Its evening dividend no longer covered the sleep it stole overnight or the cognitive tax it levied the following morning.
The difference has been difficult to ignore. I have lost roughly 20 pounds, although no single habit can claim sole custody of that achievement. More strikingly, I sleep better. My Garmin, a device not given to indiscriminate praise, now routinely awards me sleep scores in the high 80s or low 90s. I am also far less likely to wake in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling while my body conducts a fruitless internal debate over whether it is anxious, exhausted or merely annoyed to be awake.
I am currently re-reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, in which he explains why alcohol’s sedative effects should not be confused with restorative sleep. It may hasten unconsciousness, but it can fragment the night and interfere with normal sleep architecture. We've all had this experience. This is an awkward proposition because a drink can feel relaxing even as it compromises the thing relaxation is meant to facilitate. The body, as ever, is unimpressed by our preferred narrative.
What has interested me as a life long student of behavioral science is how readily the benefits began to compound. One tenet of habit formation is that behaviors seldom live alone. They occupy an ecosystem, a context. Less alcohol begat better sleep; better sleep made it easier to rise early; early rising moved exercise from the aspirational bullpen into the regular morning routine; exercise encouraged better food choices; and the entire sequence produced more energy and clearer thinking during the working day. One altered behavior became a foundation for several others. I have come to think of this less as habit stacking than as a habit cascade.
Only after making this change did I begin to notice the evidence that my personal habit experiment was part of a broader retreat. In 2025, Gallup reported that 54% of American adults said they drank alcohol, the lowest proportion in its nearly 90-year record. The figure had fallen from 62% in 2023, an unusually rapid shift after decades of relative stability. Drinkers were also drinking less: their reported weekly consumption had declined to an average of 2.8 drinks, the lowest Gallup had recorded since it began tracking that measure in 1996.
Attitudes are changing just as quickly. For the first time, a majority of Americans, 53% to be more exact, said that moderate drinking was bad for one’s health, up from 28% in 2018. Younger adults led the change, but it is no longer confined to them. The old pedagogy, in which moderate drinking and particularly red wine were sometimes presented as benign or even beneficial, is losing its hold. Consumers appear less ensorcelled by the supposedly medicinal properties of a handsome cabernet.
Nor is this solely an American curiosity. Market researcher IWSR forecasts that global alcohol volumes will remain lower in 2035 than in 2025, despite a substantial increase in the world’s legal-drinking-age population. Consumption is expected to grow in markets such as India, Mexico and Vietnam, but to contract sharply in the United States, China and several other established drinking markets. For drinks companies accustomed to dependable demand, changing tastes, health concerns and even weight-loss medicines have created a problem that may flummox the usual brand extensions.
The science is one reason for the change. Alcohol is associated with cancers of the breast, liver, colon, mouth, throat and esophagus. The US Surgeon General's advisory has helped bring that relationship into public view, while warning-label debates in Europe are challenging alcohol’s long exemption from the visual severity applied to other risky products, like cigarettes. Yet public understanding still trails the evidence. Alcohol remains culturally coded as a reward, a celebration, a gift and a social lubricant. Its biological meaning and its social meaning have occupied different worlds.
This does not mean that every drink produces an appreciable individual danger, nor that stopping immediately erases accumulated risk. The International Agency for Research on Cancer found sufficient evidence that reducing or stopping alcohol lowers the risk of oral and esophageal cancers, but the evidence remains limited or inadequate for several others. That nuance is relevant. Cogent health communication should illuminate uncertainty, not conceal it in pursuit of a more arresting headline.
Still, cultural signals are becoming harder to miss. In August, the American Cancer Society cancelled its longstanding Wine and Spirits Industry Gala, which had raised millions of dollars over several decades. The decision was not the opening fusillade of a new prohibition. It was a harbinger: an arrangement once regarded as mutually convivial had become difficult to reconcile with cancer-prevention guidance. Institutions often reveal changing norms before legislation does.
For pharma and biotech, the more intriguing story may be unfolding in an unexpected corner of the GLP-1 revolution. Over the past few years, I have interviewed many patients taking GLP-1 medicines who reported not only diminished appetite for food, but also a reduced desire for alcohol. Because the effect was unintended and not within existing labels, it was registered as an adverse event. Yet to the patient, it could feel distinctly advantageous. This is one of the industry’s recurrent ironies: an effect begins life as an anomaly, then reappears as the possible basis for an indication, like Viagra.
Altimmune is now testing that possibility deliberately. In July, the company reported positive topline results from RECLAIM, a 24-week Phase II trial of pemvidutide, its investigational glucagon/GLP-1 dual-receptor agonist, in approximately 100 people with moderate-to-severe alcohol use disorder (AUD). The company reported a placebo-adjusted reduction of 1.45 heavy-drinking days per week. Nearly two-thirds of pemvidutide-treated participants achieved a two-level reduction in the World Health Organization's risk-drinking scale, compared with roughly one-third receiving placebo. More patients achieved zero heavy-drinking days, and an objective blood biomarker supported the self-reported changes.
These are company-reported topline AUD findings, not the final word. The full results await scientific presentation and peer-reviewed publication; a larger pivotal study must still be designed with regulators; and gastrointestinal side effects and persistency will require scrutiny. But the results are sufficiently compelling to suggest that the pharmacology of appetite may overlap with the pharmacology of craving. Pemvidutide may also offer a second avenue of benefit through its direct effects on the liver, potentially addressing both drinking behavior and some of its physiological consequences.
AUD remains heavily stigmatized, infrequently diagnosed and poorly treated. Existing medicines help some patients, but the category has seen little innovation. More effective therapies could draw attention to a condition that healthcare has often relegated to willpower, moral failings, need for counseling or crisis. Obesity offers an instructive precedent: once medicines became more effective, the conversation shifted from personal failure towards treatable biology.
There is also a boundary worth respecting. Not every person who drinks less has a disorder, and not every unwanted habit requires pharmaceutical intervention. The industry should resist medicalizing ordinary preference merely because a large market can be imagined. But it should explore how people themselves define benefit. Some may seek abstinence; others moderation; still others, like me, simply want alcohol to exert less gravitational pull. Understanding those distinctions will require more than counting drinks. It will require research into cues, rituals, identity, reward and the cascading effects on sleep, weight, mood and daily functioning.
Most of the alcohol in our home has now been given away or discarded without ceremony. I do not regard its departure as evidence of virtue, and I cannot promise that I shall never again have a glass of bourbon. I am an explorer of my own habits, not an evangelist for anyone else’s. What I can say is that the desire has largely abated, ever night's sleep are now more continuous and the mornings are considerably more productive. And I'm able to fit into a small size of pants.
Alcohol is not about to disappear. Its social charms are too durable and its history too deeply fermented for that. But when personal choices, population data, medical guidance and drug development begin moving in the same direction, they merit attention. What left my drinks cabinet as a quiet health decision may be part of a much larger rearrangement, one with implications reaching from the bed to the laboratory, and from the barroom to the biotech balance sheet.
