The endless quest to replace alcohol

The first time I did shrooms and actually felt something was probably my last time doing shrooms at all. The moment it hit I was in the middle of a round of Mario Kart and abruptly handed the controller to someone else and went downstairs, as far as possible from the screen that had suddenly become terrifying to me. A familiar panic was rising in my chest, and my solution was the only thing that I knew was foolproof: wine, two glasses of it, in rapid succession. After a few minutes, my anxiety tempered as I spent the next several deeply unpleasant hours waiting for the psilocybin to leave my body.

The shrooms, a drug I have never been particularly interested in, were a result of several factors: One, everyone does shrooms now. You can buy shroom chocolate at the bodega. (This is not entirely legal.) Two, this particular group of friends is without the kind of major obligations (i.e. kids) that would preclude other people from wasting an afternoon sitting around doing drugs. Third, and probably most significantly, it is 2024, we are in our early 30s, and we are part of the demographic of people interested in ways to have fun and hang out together without resorting to the default method.

That default method is alcohol, a drug I have always been very interested in. It is also poison. Alcohol overuse causes 178,000 deaths in the US every year, and one in 12 Americans suffers from alcohol use disorder. Despite what the sponsored ads in your chumbox might say (“Great news: red wine is GOOD for you!”), even light drinking is associated with certain types of cancer and cardiovascular disease. Drinking causes hangovers, poor sleep, embarrassing texts, unexplainable bruises, and a nagging sense that you’ve done something you regret, even if you can’t quite remember it.

Hence the widespread interest in replacing alcohol with ... something else. “People are much more literate about what is good for us,” says Ruby Warrington, the author of 2018’s Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol. “It starts to shine a light on how incompatible alcohol use is with our other health goals.” When Warrington first started exploring sobriety in 2011, the only options available to nondrinkers were sugary mocktails, the classic soda water and lime, and maybe a watery nonalcoholic beer. By the late 2010s, after she’d begun hosting dry events around New York City, there was more to choose from: Athletic Brewing, the nonalcoholic craft brewery that’s become the leader in the fastest-growing segment of the beer market, debuted in 2017; the canned water brand Liquid Death followed in 2017 with its ironic heavy-metal branding. Zero-proof spirit companies and alcohol-free bars skyrocketed in the same time period, providing an option for nondrinkers to order that don’t feel out of place in boozy social settings.

The rise in “sober curiosity” is directly correlated to an interest in wellness, an industry that exploded in the early 2010s at the same time smartphones and social media became a part of everyday life. Perhaps people were searching for ways to really feel the experience of being in one’s body when everything else felt increasingly abstract; perhaps we simply wanted to look hotter for Instagram. But by 2019, the buzziest trend in alcohol was drinking less of it or none at all: low-cal, low-ABV (alcohol by volume) hard seltzers were all the rage, beer began to look and taste more like juice, and alcohol brands were marketing their products as keto- or paleo-friendly, or something to crack while kayaking or after the end of a long hike. Alcohol, it seemed, was trying to shed its image of indulgence and hedonism in an era that was increasingly judgmental of vice in general.

The wellness industry cycled through an endless carousel of products meant to cure the most prevalent ailments of the modern age, from fatigue to anxiety to obesity to wrinkles. Alcohol can exacerbate all of these things at the same time that it offers an escape from thinking about any of them. But in this explosion of snake oil, perhaps there was something that could offer all of the benefits of alcohol — the ritual of drinking a glass of wine while cooking, the extravagance of a fancy cocktail, the communal feeling of a pint at your local pub — with none of the downsides.

The first and most obvious choice was weed. The 2010s was the decade pot truly went mainstream, beginning in 2012 with Colorado and Washington’s cannabis legalization. By 2021, nearly half the country was living in states where marijuana was legal. Now, in 2024, pot is illegal in only four states, and the CDC estimated that about 18 percent of Americans used it in 2019. For some, weed offers a relaxed high with significantly fewer adverse health effects than alcohol, unless you are like me and it makes you really weird and panicky. Enter: the totally legal, handy gateway drug version — CBD, which was inserted into everything from hand cream to dog treats through the course of the 2010s — and which may not have done anything at all.

Kava, the bitter, muddy-tasting psychoactive South Pacific plant also popped up in specialized bars in urban enclaves around the country over the course of the last decade. In 2012, there were about 30 kava bars in the US; that number has since risen to 400. Mitra 9, a canned kava drink that calls itself the Budweiser of the industry, launched in late 2021, and co-founder Dallas Vasquez describes the sensation to me as a social lubricant: “You’re socially more outgoing, and it’s just kind of a relief. And the best thing about it is you’re not intoxicated — it’s not going to limit your functionality.”

Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Mitra 9 also makes a version with kratom, another plant native to Southeast Asia that acts as more of a stimulant and is sometimes used as an opioid substitute. One 2019 study estimated that 0.7 percent of Americans have consumed kratom in the past year, with people who’ve been addicted to opioids being more likely to have done so. “We do really well in the soccer mom world,” Vasquez explains. “We’re not trying to win the morning — coffee wins by a long shot — but the afternoon and the nighttime is where we want to compete. If you need more energy, you can crack a kratom; if it’s at night and you’re trying to wind down, you can crack a kava.”

Then there are shrooms. In the year after the pandemic began, mushrooms were suddenly everywhere, as alternatives for coffee and meat, in interior design, in cutesy internet aesthetics, and, of course, as drugs. Studies have shown the potential benefits of shrooms as not only consciousness-altering psychedelics but as therapeutic tools, and over the past decade or so, it’s become common for people — even ones with powerful jobs! — to be relatively open about microdosing shrooms or other psychedelics like LSD; they say it makes them more focused, more creative, and more present. At raves and nightclubs, young people are increasingly switching from alcohol, cocaine, and ecstasy to hallucinogens like ketamine, 2C-B, and DMT due to their association of being “more healing than they are harmful.”

Meanwhile on TikTok, each week brings a new way to supposedly decrease anxiety and increase sleep quality. Earlier this year, women concocted “sleepy girl mocktails” made of tart cherry juice, magnesium, and soda water; another iteration of the “sleepy girl mocktail” combined cough syrup, Jolly Ranchers, and Sprite, to make what one person on Twitter called “gentrified lean.” Supplements like ashwagandha, Vitamin D, and magnesium have all gone viral as young people search for solutions to sleep woes and stress, while also allowing for a guilt-free novelty and a way to ritualize certain moments in the day. Even if, as one doctor said, the “sleepy girl mocktail” would likely cause little more than a placebo effect, it’s part of “little treat culture,” or the idea that life should be full of small indulgences like fancy lattes and Target runs, with the twist being that the treat is actually good for you.

The exploding sector of nonalcoholic beverages that sort of look and feel like alcohol has grown apace, from chic apéritifs like Ghia or the St. Agrestis Phony Negroni; cheeky canned mocktails like Psychedelic Water, which contains kava root; and Kin Euphorics, a “functional beverage” brand co-founded by supermodel Bella Hadid. The “functional” element comes from the addition of adaptogens, or plants meant to decrease stress; nootropics, which claim to boost brainpower despite minimal evidence; and caffeine. Unlike some other alcohol alternatives, Kin promises to actually do something beyond acting as a stand-in for an Aperol spritz. Similarly, a UK startup called GABA Labs launched a synthetic alcohol called Sentia, designed to mimic the effects of alcohol without the hangovers or health problems.

Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for Tao Group Hospitality

“I’m a huge fan of all of these products,” says Warrington. “It lowers the barrier to entry for people who are sober curious or who are questioning their drinking.” She points out that, historically, alcohol recovery communities have warned against consuming these sorts of replacement products over the worry that they might hit too close to home or trigger a relapse, but these attitudes are changing along with attitudes about whether sobriety is truly one-size-fits-all.

Rax King, a writer who’s currently working on a memoir about her “poorly executed sobriety,” says that while she mostly sticks to Shirley Temples at bars, she still smokes weed and drinks kratom. “It’s evolving this idea of what sobriety can be, and I think these extensive mocktail menus and kava bars really speak to people’s desire to have something to do that isn’t just sitting on a barstool getting drunk. And I appreciate that very much, it makes sobriety a little easier,” she says.

At the same time, King is wary of any supposed miracle cure for drinking that promises all of the fun with none of the downsides. “I’m an addict myself, and I can pretty much make any intoxicant into an addiction if I put my mind to it.” Kratom, for instance, can be addictive, and on sober forums, folks have discussed the harmful addictive qualities of a kratom tonic that’s popular on social media and that left them with terrible withdrawals. It also recently went viral when TikToker Emmy Hartman realized she’d been drinking a kratom drink that made her feel euphoric and productive but later found that some refer to it as “gas station crack.”

Robert Evans, the author of A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, has used kratom since he was a teenager, usually as a coffee substitute on sluggish afternoons. “I like getting high on it, but it is an addictive drug and is one that has some health consequences,” he says. “A lot of the deaths that have occurred have been people getting stuff that is not pure kratom, and I would like to see a situation where the FDA takes a protective role without restricting people’s access.” From 2021 to 2023, a Tampa Bay Times investigation found that there were more than 2,000 fatal kratom overdoses in the US.

Though there are currently zero federal regulations around kava or kratom (some states do have them, and six states outright ban kratom), in 2016 The Verge obtained via FOIA request knowledge of 25 cases from 2004 to 2015 in which people who had consumed kava developed liver problems, severe skin rashes, and for one woman, a fatal case of hepatitis. This is dwarfed by the number of people who get sick or die from alcohol-related causes every year, but it’s clear that more research is needed to understand what effects these products have on the body.

In a Time story on Sentia, Anna Lembke, the medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford, said, “There’s always the promise of some new molecule that’s going to do exactly what the old molecule did but not have the harmful effects. Every single time, that has not panned out.” The writer points to heroin, which was invented as a safer form of morphine, and e-cigarettes, both of which can be harmful and addictive. Still, the alcohol-alternative beverage market is expected to be worth more than $29 billion by 2026, according to the WSJ.

There has been a simmering, if not formally organized contingent of people online who point to all this stuff — $15 adaptogenic mocktails or the idea that everything we consume must be good for us — and find it sort of obnoxious. “Can people stop trying to convince me that as a society we’re getting over drinking?” said the TikToker Madi Hart in a recent video. “You’re not going to be able to convince me that I don’t like alcohol. Sorry trendy people, sorry people who are like, ‘drinking is out, weed is in, microdosing shrooms is in.’ You’re not gonna convince me with your mocktail recipe or whatever.”

One particularly miserable-sounding tech industry event in San Francisco organized by the bizarre immortality crusader Bryan Johnson went viral for touting ice baths, a pushup contest, and a “supplements buffet” instead of a bar. The quote-tweets were full of people lamenting how out of touch and robotic its attendees seemed and how the fixation on self-improvement has had a sterilizing effect on culture. Much like anti-aging skin care products for tweens, craving-stopping drugs like Ozempic for already thin celebrities, or creepily hygienic millennial-gray homes, there’s a sense that humanity is being erased in favor of optimization and efficiency, that fear and risk-aversion, even the sensible kind, has lost us something greater.

The reason people drink is mostly uninteresting and extremely transparent. Alcohol is fun. It makes life and weddings and awkward work happy hours more bearable. As Evans explains, “There are no health benefits to alcohol, but there are societal benefits to alcohol, and one of those is that it changes how you think and how you operate. There are experiences you can have when you’re engaging in alcohol that are profoundly beneficial.” Much like LSD or psilocybin or anything else that alters your state of being, the harm of alcohol comes from the fact that it, well, works. “It’s the same reason that variety among human beings is positive: Different people have different points of view and experiences, and substances can change [those things.],” he says.

And yet acting unlike oneself is risky in an era of near-constant social surveillance. “Drunk doesn’t look good on social media,” says Warrington. On TikTok, young people have expressed nostalgia for an era of club culture they imagine existed before smartphones, one where everyone danced wildly to songs about “getting crunk” rather than the current state of some lounges: people standing around filming each other. It’s reminiscent of one of Sex and the City’s most iconic scenes, where Kristen Johnston as party girl Lexi Featherston shouts about how “No one’s fun anymore! Whatever happened to fun?!” She was referring to the fact that she wasn’t allowed to smoke inside, but it’s easy to imagine her giving the same diatribe in 2024 about the decrease in socially acceptable drunkenness. (Presciently, she then falls out the window to her death.)

But unlike smoking inside, it’s almost unimaginable to think of alcohol someday being fully replaced, and stories about Gen Z ushering in an era of prudish teetotalism are usually overblown or misunderstood. “If you go back to the furthest periods of time in which human beings have organized in any meaningful capacity, you find them drinking in groups. And I suspect that if you were to go forward into the far future to whatever the last human beings are that live in organized societies, you will see them drinking in groups from time to time,” says Evans. What could change, however, is how often we drink to excess. Evans points out that it is only because of industrialization and mass production that we even have the option to do so: When liquor became widely available, we immediately saw the rise of the temperance movement. A hundred years later, we’re still dealing with the aftermath of the widespread availability of alcohol in the form of death, addiction, and disease. It’s no wonder people are reconsidering their relationship to it in a time when its harms have never been easier to prove.

A major aspect of alcohol that people probably want to replace is the ritual of it, perhaps even more so than the psychoactive effects. Older civilizations throughout history have tended not to police vice and excess, as we do now, but isolate them with special occasions. “People had reliably defined periods of time in which everyone they knew would engage in excessive behavior in a ritualized fashion, and I think that was healthier than sort of leaving it up purely to when people can afford to get blasted,” he says. In our individualized culture, the closest approximations — e.g. New Year’s Eve or St. Patrick’s Day — are heavily commercialized and far from comparable to the festivals and feast days of the pre-industrialized era. When unlimited alcohol is readily available to anyone who can afford it, societies find other ways of regulating the thing we all know is terrible for us: sometimes with widespread movements to ban it entirely, sometimes with chicly packaged zero-proof cocktails.

“The world is really tough,” says Warrington. “The world has only gotten more anxiety-inducing and more challenging over the past decade or so. People are looking to numb out, they want to medicate their anxiety.”

There’s a dream that basically everyone in the world shares. It’s the dream of an alcohol that isn’t quite alcohol but almost is — a substance that will make you feel free and happy and sexy and chatty but also won’t get you addicted, won’t shave years off your life, won’t make you groggy and achy and anxious the next day. It’s the dream of a substance from which taking an entire month off as part of an annual challenge would be laughably absurd because why would anyone ever need a break from it? But such a substance could never be more than fantasy because of course human beings would find a way to render it destructive. So we try our luck with the options that we do have and weigh our odds, whether it’s with weed or shrooms or kava or cherry juice before bed, knowing that the condition of choosing when to indulge in something we know is bad for us will continue to be a part of life. We know that alcohol only makes these problems worse, yet two-thirds of Americans choose to drink anyway. Luckily, for those looking to do less of it, there’s now a lot more than seltzer on the menu.