#993 - Katie Herzog - A Controversial New Cure for Alcohol Dependence

Frankly, a lot of people I know from those days, from those days are dead.

Um, and at some point, I realized I was just sort of drinking alone, you know, the last one at the bar, except the bar wasn't a bar, it was my house, and I was by myself scrolling on my phone during COVID, drinking alone as much as I could.

I don't know whether you know, but m- the first 15 years of my adult life was spent as a club promoter.

Mm-hmm.

So I ran, I ran nightclubs for a real long time, um-

We would've gotten along really well in that period.

You ...

I would've made a lot of money from you, yeah.

(laughs)

(laughs) Um, I often think about this, that the way that party culture ... and I'm not sure if it's the same now.

I genuinely don't know if Gen Z has kind of adopted the lousy, lairy drinking culture that I knew and, and, and you would've known as well.

I'm mean, the British, it's kind of a national sport for us.

Yes.

Yeah.

Um, I often do think about how many people were just in the party enjoying themselves, these events that I used to run, um, and most people, you expected to kind of age out of them, to sort of graduate out of the young party lifestyle.

Um, but, you know, I did a million ... over a million lifetime entries a- a- across my career as a, a club promoter, so that's a pretty big sample size.

Yeah.

And I do wonder, you know, how many of these people saw the thin end of the wedge, which was, "Well, this is fun and I'm, I am with my friends and there's a good DJ on and there's music or there's whatever," but that, that is kind of this gateway that out the other side of it introduces them to a frequency of use, and maybe not even just alcohol.

Um, how many of those people went on to, yeah, kind of be ...... are more dependent.

They were, it was 4:00 A.M. in the nightclub, and they were still there, but the club was closed and no one else was around.

Yeah.

I- It's probably not an insignificant number, not that this is your fault.

There's probably, people were probably gonna find their way to addiction, uh, anyway they, any, you know, no matter what happened, whether you had been there or not.

But, you know, you're right in the, in the fact that most people do actually age out of problem drinking.

Most people who binge drink during college don't continue to binge drink into their 40s and 50s.