Will this be one of your – good – resolutions for 2025? Now in its sixth French edition, Dry January takes place once again without government support. Launched in 2013 in the UK by the organization Alcohol Change UK and introduced to France in 2020, this initiative aims to encourage people to take a month-long break and question their consumption and relationship with alcohol. How many drinks do I have a day? Why? How do I deal with social pressure to drink? And so on.

When it was launched in France at the end of 2019, the government was initially supposed to support the initiative. "To everyone's surprise, only a few months before the campaign's launch, we were told that everything was off," said the researcher Mickael Naassila, president of the Société française d'alcoologie (French society of alcohol studies), in his book, which was released in France on January 2, J'arrête de boire sans devenir chiant ("Quitting drinking without becoming boring," untranslated, Solar, 224 pages). "At issue is a 'Jovian' decision. [...] Although Santé Publique France [France's public health body] had prepared a new version of this campaign, the government pulled the plug, leaving organizations to run the scheme on their own."

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