BRYONY GORDON: Have you been tempted by the ‘Ozempic of alcohol’ pill? I certainly was, but I’ve since faced a humbling truth. This is my message to every ‘grey area’ drinker

Ten years ago, I found myself in a psychiatrist’s office begging for a drug I hoped would stop me drinking so much.

I was 35, the mother of a three-year old daughter, with a successful job, a nice husband, a lovely house in south London.

But despite all of these apparent trappings of respectability, I was drinking at least a bottle of wine a night, sometimes two, and I was miserable.

I was experiencing almost constant episodes of OCD, which I’d suffered from since childhood, and long bouts of depression. Booze was the only way to switch my brain off after a long day, but I could never stop at one glass of wine. Once I started, I would keep going, until I ‘went to bed’ (passed out) shortly before midnight, usually in blackout.

I didn’t understand what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t drink responsibly, like it said on the label of my bottle of wine.

Every morning, I’d wake up with a sore head, full of shame, and, after checking my phone to make sure I hadn’t messaged anyone anything inappropriate, I would Google phrases like ‘how to stop drinking’ and ‘ways to drink less’.

This is how I came across an article about naltrexone, a drug that shuts off the reward receptors in your brain, apparently making alcohol less appealing. And it’s how I found myself in the psychiatrist’s office, asking if she could prescribe it to me.

‘Or maybe I could have Antabuse?’ I asked, referring to a drug I’d also read about, that footballing legend George Best had been given to stop him from drinking. It works by making you violently ill when you ingest alcohol and, at the time, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution to my problems.

The psychiatrist looked seriously at me, cleared her throat. ‘Have you thought about going to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous?’ she asked.

I was incensed! How dare she suggest such a thing? I stormed out of her office and continued in my quest to stop drinking so much without having to actually completely stop.

Today, I very happily define myself as an alcoholic, and this summer it will be nine years since I last had a drink. But I’d forgotten about that unedifying moment until a couple of weeks ago, when I started seeing articles about the ‘miracle pill’ that’s been dubbed the ‘Ozempic of alcohol’.

Naltrexone was being talked about as a cure-all for people who drink too much and, suddenly, that moment in the psychiatrist’s office came flooding back to me.

Naltrexone is a helpful medicine for people trying to get clean from drug and alcohol addictions, just as GLP-1s are very helpful medicines for morbidly obese people with diabetes. But in the age of quick fixes, both have become drugs that some people want to take instead of having to go through the ‘horror’ of meaningful change.

If you have the money (private pharmacies charge around £100 for 28 prescription-only tablets) you can quietly take a pill that will switch off the desire to drink. It’s all wonderful – until you stop taking it, of course, and realise that the demon in your head was only ever having a nap.

Increasingly, naltrexone is being used by people who consider themselves ‘grey-area drinkers’, a term that exists in the great, big vacuum left by the stigma and shame attached to the word ‘alcoholic’.

If I’d known the term back when I was in that psychiatrist’s office, I would have considered myself a ‘grey-area drinker’ – someone who’d simply taken an accidental wrong turn into the wine aisle at the supermarket because I was stressed and busy and hello, who doesn’t need to drink a bottle of wine every night when they get home from work? (Quite a lot of people, it turns out).

Social media is now awash with grey-area drinking coaches, who promise to help you recalibrate your relationship with alcohol.

And maybe there really are people who only need a pill and a few hours of Zoom therapy to develop a healthy relationship with booze. But in my experience, the only way I could do this was to stop drinking it entirely. Hence the nine years of sobriety.

In the end, I found myself in rehab a year later, meeting with a counsellor. I told him how I drank. He told me I had ‘alcohol-use disorder’. I nodded along with this – it sounded medical, treatable, like I could have a few sessions with him and then start drinking like a normal human being.

Then he told me that it was just another term for alcoholic, and the game was well and truly up. I realised it was going to be easier to accept I was one, than to keep on trying to prove that I wasn’t.

Lots of people recoil at the word alcoholic – as I once did – because of all the connotations it has of old men on park benches.

Women in particular often tell me they don’t want to define themselves by this term, and I get it.

But the single most liberating thing for me has been realising that when I define myself as an alcoholic – one who absolutely can’t drink – I get to be everything else: a mother, a wife, an employee, a useful member of society who doesn’t beg psychiatrists for drugs once given to George Best because she deludedly thinks she’s a ‘grey-area drinker’ who just needs a bit of help learning to moderate.

I’m not saying there isn’t such a thing as a grey-area drinker, just that perhaps a lot of us alcoholics try to claim this space in a state of terrified denial.

And maybe in the end, the terminology isn’t all that important. Maybe the only thing that matters is that you know you’re not alone, or wrong, if you find yourself needing help with alcohol.

Megan’s my WAG of the World Cup

Thank God for Megan Pickford, who brightened up an otherwise dreary game of football between England and Ghana earlier this week. 

While many of the Wags have opted to wear plain old football shirts, the 30 year old wore a white mini dress, a £6,000 Chanel bag, and a vintage broach also from the French fashion house. 

Wherever England end up in this tournament, she’s already my Wag of the World Cup.

…and I’m wowed by Bellingham too

I’ve been marvelling at the impressive multi-lingual skills of so many players at this World Cup – from Kylian Mbappe, who can switch between French, Spanish and English, to England’s very own Jude Bellingham, giving post-match interviews in fluent Spanish, which he learnt while playing for Real Madrid. Meanwhile, Anthony Gordon learned the language, having dreamed of playing for Barcelona since childhood. 

Footballers, eh? Turns out they’ve got brains and brawn.

How Brooklyn’s been eclipsed by brother’s success

It’s been announced this week that Romeo Beckham is making his acting debut in a tennis movie called Forty Love.

Previously, Romeo played football for Brentford, and it’s clear he’s not afraid of grafting. Meanwhile, Cruz Beckham has won over critics in his rock band, and Harper is said to be developing a skincare brand for teens. All of which leads me to wonder: Brooklyn? Who he?

According to a new survey, six in ten young people want to be influencers when they grow up. One child told researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Stout that YouTubers ‘get lots of money’, while others simply drew YouTube or TikTok logos when asked what job they hoped to do.

As someone who has to do a bit of ‘influencing’ as part of her job, can I give these kids some career advice? It involves endless work for very little pay, and you never have any downtime because you’re always thinking in ‘content’. If I were you, I’d pick another career, like accounting.

Good on the Attorney General, who’s banned staff from using X, due to all the ‘racism and misogyny’ on the platform. I deleted my account years ago, when it was still known as Twitter, because the place was such a cesspit. In my mind, it’s a good rule of thumb to never trust anyone who tells you they use X.