My secret beers-after-work problem threatened to ruin my perfect family life… until I discovered the £3 ‘Ozempic for alcohol’ pill that instantly ended my cravings. Now, I’m able to stop after just one glass of wine

Jesse Carrajat appeared to have everything a man could want.

There was the beautiful wife, two young children and a third on the way, the well-paid job in insurance and the picture-perfect four-bedroom home he and his wife had built from the ground up to raise their growing family.

It was, from the outside, the portrait of a man who had made it.

Yet behind the doors of that carefully constructed life, Mr Carrajat was fighting a battle that almost no one could see. He could not stop drinking.

Mr Carrajat traces the beginning of his problems to the Covid pandemic in 2020, when the boundaries between his high-pressure job and family life suddenly disappeared.

Like millions of others, he suddenly found himself working from home – and struggling to ‘switch off’ when the working day ended.

‘I’d be working and dealing with all the stresses of that,’ he said. ‘And the moment I finished, I would walk down the corridor and have to be in dad mode, holding the kids, wrestling them, calming their temper tantrums. There was no break, no pause.’

Alcohol began to provide one.

At first, Mr Carrajat, now 41, would slip unnoticed into the garage of his home at the end of the working week and quickly drink a beer before returning to his family.

‘It started as one just to take the edge off on a Thursday or Friday, but pretty soon my tolerance went up, so that became two, and then three,’ he told the Daily Mail.

Before long, the end-of-week release had crept into the rest of his life.

‘Alcohol became a daily ritual for me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes on a Wednesday, I would buy a four-pack of beers, thinking I had enough to last four days, and drink them all.

‘At 5.15pm on a Tuesday I was reaching for a beer. Other times, I would pour myself a shot.

‘When my drinking picked up in frequency, I felt weak and ashamed. I am a guy who prides myself on discipline, having it all together and showing up for my wife and kids, and I was failing at that.

‘I didn’t want to reach out for help either, because I didn’t want to be held accountable for what I was doing and I didn’t want to feel judged.’

When he returned to the office, Carrajat said he never drank at work – or to excess around colleagues. Instead, the drinking remained a largely secret habit, carried out furtively at home.

He continued slipping into the garage in New Jersey to drink, crushing the empty beer cans beneath his foot and hiding them under piles of cardboard so his wife would not find them.

Soon, the deception became more elaborate.

‘I would buy drinks with cash just so my wife could not see it on the bank statement,’ he said. ‘And then I started to hide whiskey bottles in obscure places, like at the back of the pantry. I thought if my wife found them it would look like they’d been bought ages ago and misplaced.’

Mr Carrajat said that, at his worst, he would drink 11 or 12 alcoholic drinks on both Friday and Saturday, as well as several every weeknight.

Like roughly 1.35million Britons, and 28million Americans, he had quietly developed an addiction to alcohol.

Known medically as alcohol use disorder, or AUD, it is not defined simply by how much someone drinks, but by losing control over alcohol – continuing to drink despite the damage it causes to health, work or relationships.

There is no fixed number of drinks that means someone has AUD. Instead, doctors look for a pattern of behaviour: intense cravings, drinking that begins to interfere with work or family life, and giving up activities once enjoyed in order to drink.

For Mr Carrajat, the consequences were becoming increasingly difficult to hide. After his secret weekend binges came mornings spent battling hangovers while trying to play the part of husband and father.

‘I constantly felt on edge,’ he said. ‘On Saturday mornings, the first five hours would be me faking it, being anxious and wanting to go somewhere to clear my head, when I should have been enjoying myself with my family.

‘On Sunday mornings, I could barely make it through the church service.’

The turning point came in 2023, when Mr Carrajat decided he was ‘sick and tired of always being sick and tired’.

He had tried to quit several times before, promising himself he would go a week without drinking, only to give in on the first day.

‘I remember there was a moment where I crushed a beer can again and put it under the rubbish this time, and just thought to myself, “Wow, you are in trouble here.”

‘The very next thing I did was go to my wife and say, “Hey, Meg, I think I need help drinking less.” And I remember her response was like, “Yeah, no s***.” Clearly I wasn’t hiding things as well as I thought I was.’

At first, he tried using an app to track the days he managed not to drink. But within two weeks, he found himself slipping back into the same familiar pattern – convincing himself that just one beer wouldn’t hurt, only to find one quickly became several.

It was then, while scrolling through Instagram, that he stumbled across an influencer talking about a treatment he had never considered: naltrexone.

Although better known as a medicine for opioid addiction, naltrexone can also be used to treat AUD.

It works by blocking opioid receptors involved in the brain’s reward system, reducing some of the pleasurable effects of alcohol and, for some people, helping to dampen the urge to keep drinking.

Naltrexone is available in two main forms – a daily oral tablet and a long-acting injection, which is typically given once a month.

Costing about £3 per pill, it has been dubbed ‘Ozempic for alcohol’ because of its ability, in some patients, to dramatically reduce cravings.

Mr Carrajat was sceptical. But after receiving a prescription he took his first tablet straight away. The effect was almost instant.

Because oral naltrexone’s effects vary over the course of the day, patients may be advised to take their daily dose shortly before the period when their cravings are typically strongest – in Mr Carrajat’s case, the early evening.

‘I took it that first time just before dinner,’ he said. ‘I remember sitting at the table and looking at the wine, and I just didn’t care about it.

‘I was staring at it thinking, “I should want that.” And I didn’t. It was so wild that such a tiny pill could do that.’

He continued taking naltrexone daily for three months and said his desire to drink virtually disappeared.

There were some initial side-effects. For the first two weeks, he said he sometimes felt anxious and noticed a dip in his energy levels, but both effects quickly subsided.

He did not drink at all during those three months. But on the day he stopped taking the drug daily, he cautiously poured himself a glass of wine.

For perhaps the first time in years, one was enough.

Today, Mr Carrajat can have the occasional drink with his wife or friends without finding himself pulled back into the patterns that once dominated his life. He still takes naltrexone, but now only before social occasions where he expects to drink.

Studies show the medication – which is available on prescription and is not addictive – has a near 80 per cent success rate at getting users to drastically reduce or eliminate drinking altogether.

In comparison, other rehabilitation methods – such as Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-step programme, which relies on changing thoughts and behaviours and accepting responsibility for past harms – has success rates of less than 15 per cent, according to the World Health Organisation.

Yet, while naltrexone is available on the NHS, it is only usually prescribed to people to prevent relapse once they have already become sober – something experts say should change.

‘This pill has been shown to reduce drinking so much more effectively than other therapies, like counselling and rehabilitation, and yet many GPs have never heard of it,’ says Dr Janey Merron, an alcohol specialist at the Sinclair Method UK clinic.

‘It’s really devastating for the vast number of people who are missing out.’