Dry January Hangover: Symptoms, Remedies & Recovery
- "There's a kind of risk aversion that you tend to associate with liberal politics," Edward Slingerland, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia and Dartmouth, said,...
- Arguably, the relationship between progressivism and teetotalism was further cemented during the Biden Administration.
- After spending much of 2025 dismantling the U.S.'s public-health infrastructure,the Trump Administration ushered in Dry January 2026 with new dietary guidelines that eliminated the advice that men consume...
“There’s a kind of risk aversion that you tend to associate with liberal politics,” Edward Slingerland, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia and Dartmouth, said, of abstaining from alcohol. In 2021, Slingerland published a history of drinking, appropriately titled “Drunk.” The public-health establishment “wants to do everything it can to reduce risk to zero and sees risk reduction as the primary goal, rather than community or enjoying life.”
Arguably, the relationship between progressivism and teetotalism was further cemented during the Biden Administration. In the waning days of Biden’s presidency, Vivek H. Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, issued a twenty-two-page guidance that described a “causal relationship” between alcohol and seven types of cancer. The guidance called for warning labels on alcohol containers, similar to those on cigarette packs. Conservatives were inherently suspicious of the guidance, given that Murthy was also an advocate of COVID vaccines and gun control. (Murthy declined to comment for this article.) A headline in the National Review proclaimed “Alcohol Warning Labels Are Nanny Statism at Its Worst.” (The magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., was fond of white wine with a splash of crème de cassis, an apéritif known as the Kir.)
After spending much of 2025 dismantling the U.S.’s public-health infrastructure,the Trump Administration ushered in Dry January 2026 with new dietary guidelines that eliminated the advice that men consume no more than two drinks per day, and that women keep to one. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, issued pithier advice about alcohol: “Don’t have it for breakfast.”
It surprised me, then, that, when I interviewed Oz, earlier this month, he approved of Dry January. He compared the practise to othre types of hormetic shock-a low-dose e