When the pandemic hit in 2020, Brooke Berlet decided to do something different with her life: she decided to get sober.

Having worked in the restaurant industry most of her life, she lived by a “work hard, play harder” mantra, fueling herself with vodka that resulted in several hospitalizations. “I used to call it the hospital hop,” Berlet says, sitting in the courtyard of Manchester Memorial Hospital. “I went from hospital to hospital with unrelated things that I did when I was drinking but didn’t want to admit I was an alcoholic, but I knew I needed help.”

Berlet had already decided to cut back on drinking when the pandemic hit. The government shutdown of restaurants left her at home with a lot of time on her hands. While many others turned to alcohol or other drugs during this tumultuous moment in history, Berlet went in the opposite direction. Forced out of the bar and restaurant life that helped fuel her addiction, she began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings online. 

“People wonder how I did that or say that’s impossible. My answer is willingness and going to any lengths to maintain sobriety. So, the pandemic hit and restaurants were closed indefinitely and I thought, we need to change something, because going back to that line of work after the pandemic is not something that is going to sustain my sobriety,” Berlet says. “I had no intention to stop drinking forever because I couldn’t imagine my life without it. I had a drink with me everywhere, it didn’t matter what time of day it was. But I knew I needed to do something.”

When the pandemic shutdowns finally lifted, Berlet didn’t go back to work at a restaurant, however. During her recovery journey she decided to utilize her degree in psychology in conjunction with her new-found sobriety. She started sending out applications and was hired by the Rushford Center in Middletown, one of the state’s premier addiction centers operated by Hartford Healthcare. She then transferred to a long-term residential facility to continue working with others suffering from addiction.

Today, Berlet is a certified recovery coach for the Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR), a nonprofit organization funded by the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS). CCAR operates five recovery centers throughout the state that offer classes, support specialists and group therapy throughout the day, with more facilities being developed in Torrington and either Norwich or New London.

But CCAR also runs a recovery program with coaches, like Berlet, who are called into hospital emergency rooms to meet with people admitted for drug or alcohol issues. CCAR has recovery coaches covering every hospital in the state and Berlet is one of them. She covers hospitals like Manchester Memorial, Hartford Hospital, Backus, Lawrence and Memorial, Day Kimball Hospital and St. Francis Hospital.

When doctors and nurses are confronted with a patient who is dealing with addiction issues they can offer to call CCAR, which will then dispatch one of their sixteen recovery coaches to meet with that person and discuss recovery.

“We call them recoveries. We don’t call them clients; we don’t call them patients; they’re recoveries,” Berlet said. “The first question is, what does recovery look like for you and how can I help you? And then slowly but surely, they start to share why they are there.”

And for the majority of cases Berlet handles, the reason is because of alcohol. While much attention, both in Connecticut and nationally, has been focused on opioid abuse, which has skyrocketed over the last decade and rightfully raised alarm over its devastating effects and high overdose death toll, the more prevalent addiction in terms of numbers is alcohol. It’s widespread social and cultural acceptance means that oftentimes the dark side of alcohol is overlooked despite the toll it takes on society.

At one point in the interview, Berlet stops to take a phone call. When she finishes, she explains that the call was from the mother of a man in his late twenties who has been hospitalized for alcoholism. Berlet knows him; he’s been hospitalized multiple times and she’s met with him before. Now, he’s being discharged, and his mother doesn’t know what to do.

“A lot of times we are supporting the family because it’s a family disease and they have no idea what to do,” Berlet said. “Some of the people we see are not even 21 yet and they’re coming in asking for help because things have just gotten out of control and they’re afraid they may not make it much longer. It’s a conversation we need to have.”

“It is hidden out in the open,” said Rebecca Allen, director of recovery advocacy for CCAR. “When we’re talking about opiates and when we’re talking about a lot of the illicit drugs, that’s kind of front and center because people are dying and they’re dying very quickly, they’re overdosing. With alcohol it’s just a slower death, so we’re talking about people who have chronic alcoholism.”

Kevin Shuler, recovery coach manager for CCAR, says on average about 60 to 65 percent of the people CCAR’s recovery coaches meet with in emergency departments are there for alcohol related issues. According to Shuler, they typically see an average of 550 people per month, but in August of 2023 they saw 650 people across the state, marking the second highest month CCAR has ever had. Their highest month on record so far was July 2021. In fact, the whole year of 2021 was their highest year for referrals, just as the country was moving into the post-pandemic phase.

“What we’re seeing, especially in remote rural areas, is definitely a high uptick in alcohol use, but also in acuity, severity, damage,” Shuler said. “We’re seeing some very complicated comorbidities and other health issues exacerbated by substance use and in this instance alcohol use, specifically. So yes, alcohol use is definitely the unseen epidemic.”

“We’ve broken records within the last couple months with the number of individual visits in a day, we’ve broken records of visits to ED’s within a week, within a month,” Berlet said, whose phone is continually dinging with updates and messages from the CCAR team.

Although alcohol use disorder (AUD) in Connecticut is often “unseen” because of its social and cultural acceptability, it can and does rear its ugly head: high-profile car accidents, including wrong-way drivers on state highways, have plagued the state in the post-pandemic years; incidents of intoxicated state lawmakers and local officials caught on camera at their worst moments; millions of dollars funneled to towns as part of a state program to reimburse municipalities for the number of mini-liquor bottles, commonly called nips, sold in liquor stores. 

“Sometimes we meet somebody in the hospital, and we ask them how much they’re drinking in a day, more often than not we get the number in the form of nip bottles,” Shuler said.

“It’s fatal, it just takes people longer and they usually end up dying of cirrhosis and a lot of accidents, quite honestly. They fall and hit their heads and get concussions and repeated concussions can really damage somebody. It’s just a slower death. The wrong way drivers, the motor vehicle accidents as well as on the job accidents too,” Allen said. “I think it’s just a little bit hidden because of the focus on overdoses and opiates.”

Nationally, the death toll related to alcohol in 2022 was more than 140,000, according to the National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism (NIAA). Comparatively, deaths related to any opioid – including fentanyl and heroin – numbered 80,411 in 2021, and gun deaths – homicide, suicide and accidental – accounted for 48,830 lives lost.

In Connecticut specifically, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate that an average of 1,426 people died per year between 2015 and 2019 due to excessive alcohol use, which includes several different types of cancer, motor vehicle crashes and alcohol poisonings. Once again, comparatively, that number outpaces opioid related deaths, which averaged 892.2 between 2012 and 2022, according to numbers from the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). That average, however, includes combinations of drugs and a sharp increase in opioid related deaths that skyrocketed from 298 in 2012 to 1,339 in 2022, one of the reasons the opioid epidemic has, rightfully, drawn so much attention. 

Gun deaths in Connecticut accounted for an average of 191 deaths per year between 2011 and 2020, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, 115 of which (60 percent) were suicides. Alcohol use has also been linked to violent crime, particularly domestic violence, with upwards of 2/3 of domestic violence perpetrators having consumed alcohol at the time of the incident.

Alcohol use disorder – and substance use in general – weighs heavily on marriages and families, as well. A 2014 study found AUD resulted in significantly higher divorce rates, 48 percent, compared to a 30 percent divorce rate for marriages that did not involve AUD, which can have serious effects on both the adults and the children.

And, of course, excessive alcohol use comes at a cost not just in terms of lives lost or broken families. According to the CDC in 2010, excessive alcohol use cost Connecticut $3 billion in lost work productivity, healthcare costs, criminal justice expenses, motor vehicle crashes and property damage. Adjusted for inflation, that comes out to roughly $4 billion in 2022, according to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics.

All in all, alcohol is the fourth largest cause of preventable deaths in the United States, according to NIAAA. By most measures, Connecticut is above the national average when it comes to alcohol use, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which stated that Connecticut was among the 10 states with the highest alcohol use prevalence since 2010. According to the CDC, average binge drinking among Connecticut adults mirrored the national average, but alcohol addiction problems in Connecticut remain similar to opioid addiction problems in terms of numbers.

According to DMHAS’s annual statistical reports, alcohol is on par with heroin and all other opioids as the primary drug of choice for people admitted to their programs for either substance abuse or mental health. While the ratio of alcohol to opioids has remained fairly steady between the 2019 and 2022 reports, the number of people in those programs has declined.

In 2019, alcohol was the primary drug for 36 percent of all individuals active in DMHAS-funded programs and 40 percent of admissions, totaling 28,987 people. Heroin and other opioids were slightly higher in the active group, totaling 29,416, but accounted for only 35 percent of admissions. By 2022, alcohol was the primary drug of choice for 34 percent or 22,853 active members of DMHAS programs, compared to 38 percent for opioids, but still resulted in more admissions, outpacing opioids by three percent and far outpaced opioids for admission to mental health programs.

This is information, however, is not meant to diminish or detract from the absolute devastating and deadly consequences of opioid use: far more people use alcohol than, for example, heroin, and opioids are more deadly and kill more rapidly.

But the widespread social acceptance, use and celebration and encouragement of alcohol means that alcohol’s devastating effects are often masked or ignored — invisible, in a way — despite AUD affecting nearly 30 million people in the U.S. over the age of 12, roughly 10 percent of the population in that age group. Comparatively, opioid use disorder affects approximately 3 million people in the U.S.

The information on alcohol-related deaths is limited to 2019 at this point, however, there appears to have been an upswing in AUD during the pandemic years in Connecticut, according to Dr. Craig Allen, medical director for the Rushford Center, who says prior to the pandemic, alcohol treatment was roughly half, maybe less, of the patients they treated compared to opioids.

“As we moved through Covid – and I’m not blaming Covid for this – the proportion of patients being treated for alcohol was clearly higher. The numbers treated for alcohol increased and the percentage treated for alcohol increased versus opioid use disorder,” Dr. Allen said. “People talk about deaths of despair, depression and different life stressors; those stressors certainly increased during Covid and drove people who might not have had a problem with alcohol, but may have used alcohol regularly, to start using alcohol to manage anxiety or depression or insomnia, to use it in a way that was not just recreational or social and moved a number of those people who didn’t meet the criteria for having a substance use disorder into the higher symptoms of dysfunction and actually having a pathology.”

“People started to drink more and have problems with drinking,” Dr. Allen continued.

Berlet says she’s seeing recovering alcoholics in emergency rooms who had maintained sobriety up until the pandemic but fell back into old habits when in-person recovery meetings and other resources were shut down in response to Covid.

“Addiction is isolation and that’s what we had during the pandemic,” Berlet said. “The pandemic definitely had an effect on alcoholism and our culture in general, it had a huge effect on people who are struggling.”

Nationally, those observances appear to hold true. The National Center on Drug Abuse Statistics found that liquor stores, which were allowed to remain open during the pandemic, saw a 54 percent increase in sales during the pandemic, while online liquor sales rose 262 percent. Overall, year over year alcohol sales were up 234 percent during peak Covid, with most reporting they increased their drinking due to stress and boredom. 

According to the comprehensive Monitoring the Future Report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which examines trends in drug use among adults aged 19 – 60, there was a significant bump in binge drinking among adults aged 19-30 in 2021, followed by a similar dip in 2022. Adults between the ages of 35 and 50 saw a similar increase in binge drinking during the same time period, but without the 2022 dip.

Interestingly, women saw a more pronounced increase in binge drinking, according to the report, rising from 14.6 percent of the study population to 22.7 percent, while men across the same time period saw an increase from 33.7 percent to 36.3 percent. The increase in alcohol abuse among women is something that CCAR’s Rebecca Allen says they’ve noticed as well, and something she attributes to successful marketing. 

“There are more and more women who are running into issues with alcohol misuse. I see that a lot in the work we do, where we have mothers, we have the mommy wine culture,” Rebecca Allen said. “And if you really kind of look at it, it’s marketed to women. You see that in movies, you see that in commercials. It’s not just the beer commercials during football. It’s very front and center in our culture. And the pandemic hasn’t helped anybody. The pandemic really made the problem that much worse for people.”

Dr. Allen of Rushford says that it’s not that alcoholism and the negative effects of alcohol are invisible or hidden, but rather that it is so much a part of social and cultural life that it is essentially hiding in plain sight, spurred on by aggressive and sophisticated marketing campaigns.

“There’s a huge industry, it has some very sophisticated and persuasive advertising rhetoric attached to it, and our culture and society at this point that the use of alcohol is seemingly inextricably sown into the fabric,” Dr. Allen said. “It’s so out there, the use and the acceptance and the business component and the marketing component, that it’s difficult to muster a campaign looking at the dark side of alcohol. In that sense it certainly doesn’t get the air play that an opioid use disorder might get.”

More and more, that marketing appears targeted at women who, according to the Monitoring Our Future study, have increasingly turned to alcohol, while men have shown an overall downward trend.

Between 1988 and 2022, binge drinking among women aged 19-30 increased from 23.5 percent to 26 percent, while men saw a decrease from 44.7 percent to 35.7 percent. For ages 35 through 50, the effect for women was more pronounced, rising from 13.8 percent in 2008 to 22.7 percent in 2022, while men in that age group saw a smaller increase, rising from 33.1 percent to 36.3 percent. 

According to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), American women ranked fifth highest for binge drinking out of 38 countries analyzed in the study, which only included information for 2019 and showed a much smaller gap between men and women than most other countries.

Low-calorie alcoholic seltzer drinks are largely marketed to women, as is wine, part of the “mommy wine culture” referenced by Rebecca Allen, and it often plays out in pop culture and on social media.

“It’s a huge problem that really isn’t discussed enough because of the culture that we live in,” Berlet said. “It’s funny to talk about mommy’s sippy cup, it’s funny to talk about dad drinking beers on the lawnmower, that’s just what our culture and our society does.”

“Whether it’s primary alcohol or secondary related to alcohol there’s a lot of traffic related to emergency room visits and those numbers have gone up dramatically over the last ten or fifteen years. They’ve gone up in men and women, but the rates have gone up much more quickly in women,” Dr. Allen said. “The fact that rates of drinking have gone up so much quicker in women than in men is quite concerning because it hits them worse.”

Dr. Allen notes that women tend to drink more due to stress and negative emotions, factors that were compounded during the pandemic.

“Women were more likely to be the sole caretaker of children, oftentimes the sole provider for a family, and more likely to lose their jobs during Covid and ironically more likely to be mandated to work during Covid,” Dr. Allen said. So, we saw those rates go up during Covid, more significantly in the vulnerable population, and women are a vulnerable population for alcohol, overall, with rapidly increasing numbers.”

While government officials in Connecticut have made concerted efforts to limit cigarette smoking and vaping – with lawmakers offering up legislation to restrict the sale of flavored vaping products – the approach with alcohol has been much different. Legislative attempts to limit vaping products because the flavors appeal to youth, ignore the same appealing flavors of hard liquors, with vodkas in particular advertising products infused with the flavors of cotton candy, chocolate or peanut butter.

Liquor stores were allowed to remain open during the pandemic and have long been able to deliver to homes. Gov. Ned Lamont, in April of 2020, also allowed restaurants to deliver alcohol along with food to help keep them afloat during the lockdown, an executive order that was codified into state law just two years later.

“A lot of people right now are starting to realize that the drinking they started to do or were doing during the pandemic they’ve continued to do because, you know, alcohol delivery services, drive up to the package store and they load the booze into your trunk,” Berlet said. “I even have family members reach out to me saying they’re not sure what to do about their wife or their son or whatever because they say they’re not drinking but they’re really just ordering booze from home, and it shows up on the front steps and then what does the family do?”

Connecticut officials have consistently pursued legal action against a myriad of different industries for problems – health and otherwise – related to the marketing and distribution of their products. Connecticut was part of the massive legal settlement with Big Tobacco, arguing the companies’ deceptive marketing practices caused massive healthcare costs to states and eventually resulted in a massive $363 billion settlement. Connecticut has thus far received $3.1 billion since 1998 to put toward tobacco reduction efforts

Similarly, Connecticut, along with many other states, pursued litigation against Purdue Pharma and other pharmaceutical companies for the marketing of opioid drugs that helped fuel the opioid epidemic. The multibillion-dollar settlement will also be directed toward opioid addiction reduction efforts, and Connecticut is currently pursuing litigation against Exxon Mobil for allegedly withholding from the public information about how oil products contribute to climate change. The state, along with several others, is looking for damages to help mitigate future climate change effects.

While alcohol use and misuse can certainly be tied to public harm, there has been little effort by public officials to pursue similar litigation, despite findings that show alcohol companies engage in largely the same practices that landed tobacco companies in hot water.

Thomas Babor, Ph.D, Professor Emeritus of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, has researched and published extensively on alcohol marketing, the industry’s political influence and its effects not only on the general public, but also vulnerable groups like youth and women, and has found that massive alcohol corporations have learned from and are mimicking the practices of tobacco companies.

“Alcohol companies have pretty much learned a lot from the tobacco companies, which is perhaps why they’re not regulated in the same way, such as marketing bans,” Babor said. “The playbook is to appear to be in compliance — common-sense things like not targeting children — and to emphasize self-regulation; to fund organizations that contest the validity of research showing that alcohol is a cause of certain types of cancer and heart disease, and they invest heavily in political contributions, lobbying and litigation when they feel like they’re being threatened.”

As an example, Babor points to a 2017 case in northern Canada in which the liquor industry temporarily stopped research into the effects of placing cancer warnings on alcohol, akin to the cancer warning placed on cigarettes. The pushback from the liquor industry delayed the study and forced the replacement of cancer warning labels with labels showing a standard drink size and another showing “low-risk drinking guidelines,” according to a press release from the Yukon government. 

“They have organizations that recruit sympathetic scientists and support their work and publicize it. So, the public then in the newspaper reads articles saying maybe alcohol isn’t that bad for cancer, because the methods were inappropriate for a particular study,” Babor said. “When in fact, the people who are publishing this kind of research have a much higher proportion of investigators who receive money from the alcohol companies, just like the tobacco industry, both internally and through contracts with universities, was found to be influencing science by paying scientists to conduct research and flying them around to give talks.” 

According to Babor, alcohol marketing campaigns, like their Big Tobacco predecessors, do not just come in the form of television commercials or billboard, but also in the placement of their product in movies to influence the perception that using their product is trendy, as well as funneling more and more money into social media and digital advertising.

“There’s enough research to indicate that the exposure to alcohol marketing affects the onset of drinking in young people and progression to binge drinking,” Babor said. “They’ve switched lot of their advertising to the digital media, including social media. That has been a big change, although they continue with traditional advertising.”

Alcohol addiction, like most addictions, is notoriously difficult to treat. Unlike most other addictive drugs, alcohol withdrawal can kill, which means for an alcoholic to detox requires medical supervision, and Shuler says there are barriers to placing people who are on Medicare and have a co-occurring medical issue into residential treatment programs.

“It’s problematic because it limits their placement to one of two free-standing facilities in the state and adversely affects those living in poverty,” Shuler said. “Treatment facilities receive a rating based on the care they offer. The typical treatment center is rated as a 3.7, but if the individual has a history of seizures, walks with a cane, or has any number of other physical health conditions, those facilities won’t accept them, deeming them in need of a higher level of care.”

“Many times, we’ll see somebody who is on Social Security Income or some form of Medicare or managed Medicare plan; they might 50 years old, but they have a host of medical issues that is really preventing them from getting treatment in your traditional treatment facilities,” Shuler said. “This really limits our ability in Connecticut to go to really two facilities if it’s not a hospital detox. Those facilities are backlogged tremendously.”

Furthermore, residential treatment can be out of reach for those on Medicare. While Medicare will cover hospital detox and outpatient addiction services, Medicare won’t cover residential treatment. So, an individual coming out of a five-day medical detox in a hospital and wants to get on better footing with their sobriety and support system by separating themselves from their current living situation may not have many options. “That’s definitely a challenge and a gap,” Shuler said.

Berlet says that many people she meets with are on state or federal insurance and experiencing poverty and homelessness. “Homelessness and shelter is a huge thing in our community,” Berlet said. “People are just drinking to fall asleep on a park bench, not necessarily to fall asleep but pass out, and then when they are found in a public place, police are called, police transport them to the hospital.”

But once the hospital has medically cleared them, they’re back on the street with liquor stores on every corner. The severity of alcohol withdrawals, however, leads many to fear for their lives and often return to drinking in order to stabilize. 

“A lot of times its people who are struggling with withdrawal symptoms, they’ve tried to stop on their own and they’ve come to the realization that they can’t do it alone and they are scared something is going to happen medically. The only thing that fixes that is another drink,” Berlet said.

It’s one gap that CCAR hopes to fill by connecting individuals looking to recover from alcoholism in the right program or treatment center and maintaining contact with them following hospital discharge, but Dr. Allen of Rushford believes that more can be done on the front end of alcohol addiction, before it gets so bad.

“We’re not as effective as we could be on the front end with primary care providers identifying and being able to address alcohol use disorder as well as the primary care providers having connections with specialty treatment programs,” Dr. Allen said.

Dr. Allen also believes there needs to be more programs that meet people where they are, namely, in their homes and community to help them manage sobriety in their day-to-day lives while being monitored by a team of support specialists.

“We have a couple programs that do that but that could be an area that could be bolstered across the state,” Dr. Allen said. “Having the ability to reach out into the community and follow up with that person and in that person’s environment and with the people in that person’s environment is an area where there’s a lot of room to improve.”

Another potential gap, according to most interviewed by Inside Investigator, is simply getting the message out about treatment options. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has long been the most recognized and publicly known community-based treatment program and rightfully so: it’s 12-step practice has a long history and is utilized in treatment centers and hospitals across the country in addition to having a high availability of volunteer-directed meetings available to anyone interested in recovery.

Both Berlet and Shuler say they got sober through the 12-step process but acknowledge that it isn’t always the best fit for some individuals, and that there is no one path to sobriety. Part of CCAR’s mission is giving recoveries all their options and helping find which one best suit their needs and wants; many are not even aware these treatment programs exist.

“AA, twelve steps, that is what’s known, that’s how you get sober, that’s how I got sober. For some people that doesn’t work for them and that’s okay,” Berlet said. “There are multiple pathways to recovery and what works for one person isn’t going to work for the next and we integrate different pathways based on what they shared with us.”

For instance, someone who really enjoys being active and outdoors may prefer The Phoenix, a national program that supports sobriety and recovery through physical fitness, outdoor activities and wellness. For those who are more religion-oriented, there is Celebrate Recovery, a Christian-based recovery program, or Recovery Dharma that utilizes Buddhist teachings for recovery. Finally, for the more scientifically inclined there’s Smart Recovery, whose programs “are based on scientific evidence,” and utilizes Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.

Besides that, there’s a crop of medications – four of which have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – that help curb alcohol cravings. Dr. Allen says these medications can be effective in the right situations and for the right people and they are used at Rushford, along with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and group therapy. Rushford will also explore non-FDA approved medication treatments, depending on the individual.

“There are a number of other medications that show effectiveness, and we explore those using the ones that have more evidence before we look at ones that have less evidence,” Dr. Allen said.

They’re all recovery alternatives to the traditional AA model and programs that CCAR recovery coaches can steer recoveries toward in their personal journey; it’s about getting the message out about the dangers of alcohol that’s more than the “drink responsibly” notice quickly attached to the tail end of beer commercials.

“I think some of the issue is that people don’t realize that alcohol is addicting, if you drink enough over time that when you don’t drink you feel bad,” Rebecca Allen said, “and physically it can be very dangerous.”

But Dr. Allen believes the future is looking brighter for the younger generation when it comes to alcohol use; the number of high school aged youth using alcohol has declined dramatically. 

Alcohol is still the drug of choice among young people, but according to the Monitoring Our Future Study that focused on adolescents, alcohol use is dropping while vaping nicotine and marijuana usage have increased. That alcohol use has declined is a good thing, Dr. Allen says, but he believes the increase in nicotine and marijuana use remains a cause for concern.

“The rate of alcohol use by high school students has gone down significantly. That is great, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It’s a huge problem. It’s the most commonly used addictive substance for adolescents,” Dr. Allen said. “There’s a relationship between using nicotine under the age of 18 and going on to use marijuana and using marijuana and other addictive substances, including alcohol. The significant increases and the decreases in alcohol are related.”

The percentage of 12th grade students who used alcohol over the past years has declined from 73 percent in 2001 to 52 percent in 2022, according to Monitoring the Future. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health found underage driving in Connecticut decreased from 18.5 percent in 2008 to 11.2 percent in 2021. More and more, young people are eschewing alcohol, although perhaps for other substances as they become more widely available. Naturally, there remains not only peer pressure to drink for young people, but also cultural pressure, and part of that pressure comes in the form of social media trends, and often it doesn’t require big budget marketing.

Dr. Allen points to a Tik Tok trend that gained popularity in 2022 among college students called BORGs, an acronym for Black Out Rage Gallons – a mixture of half a gallon of water, a full bottle of vodka, water flavoring and hydration packs. He then points to news reports about 46 college students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who were hospitalized due to drinking them as part of a “challenge.”

And while Tik Tok has brought many mind-numbingly dumb challenges and ideas to young people, the social media platform has also become a go-to for sobriety. #Sobertiktok or #SoberTok on the platform is filled with videos of people in recovery sharing their stories, their challenges and successes to help inspire others who may be confronting a problem with alcohol, some gaining hundreds of thousands of views and likes.

Indeed, according to recent studies and polls, the percentage of college students who snub alcohol entirely has grown from 20 percent to 28 percent over the last ten years in the U.S., largely due to greater awareness of the harmful effects of alcohol and social media, according to the BBC.

“There is definitely a sobriety movement out there,” Berlet said, who noted that she also posts sobriety messages on Tik Tok. “My personal motto is recover out loud so nobody has to suffer alone. I’m on social media and it’s known. I’m in recovery, I’ve been sober X amount of time, reach out. Part of what CCAR does is spread the message that it’s okay to be sober, you can have fun in sobriety.”

The growing turn from alcohol has also resulted in a business success story in Connecticut. In 2018, Athletic Brewing launched in Stratford, Connecticut. Athletic co-founder Bill Shufelt sought to create a great tasting nonalcoholic beer and, after some experimentation, hit the mark. Athletic Brewing has since grown into a multiple award-winning brewery, with its products available coast to coast, having expanded their brewing operation into San Diego and internationally. 

Shufelt says he saw a market opportunity in non-alcoholic beer after he quit drinking ten years ago, but still wanted to enjoy good food and good beer during those moments when people collectively gather and eat and drink together.

“It was really, authentically out of my own lifestyle,” Shufelt said. “I realized there were so few alternatives [to alcoholic beer] out there, and there were so few moderation off-ramps, also. People were either drinking or not drinking and there was no half-way. You either wanted what was on the alcoholic menu or you were at the kids table.” 

“Within any group of people, there are people who are either not drinking or drinking less, and that’s increasingly common among young generations,” Shufelt said, noting the decreasing percentage of Generation Z who drink. “I wanted to give people the choice to either drink or not and still be in the moment with equal experience.”

Athletic’s explosive growth over the last five years has spurred overall growth in the nonalcoholic beer market: major alcohol brands released their own nonalcoholic beers following Athletic’s start, including Heineken, Budweiser, Guinness and Two Roads, among many others.

“We tend to think Athletic has permissioned beer brands to launch their flagship brands into the category,” Shufelt said. “Basically, we went from a category with no flagship brands to everybody being permissioned to put their brand into the category. Which, talking about tearing down walls, if everybody knows the brands in the category and are excited about them, it makes moderation really accessible and it takes the social stigmatization of making those choices way down.” 

But Shufelt says it wasn’t easy at first convincing retailers there was a desire for their product, despite roughly 50 percent of people surveyed who said they would drink Athletic’s products regularly. 

“For a category that was .3 percent of the beer world, those stats let me know that we just have to bridge the gap between us and the customer because the customer really wants it,” Shufelt said. “We saw that right from the jump. The second it started showing up the shelves, we outgrew our first brewery in ten months. We very quickly went from being one of the smallest of the 10,000 breweries in the country to a top 25 brewery by size.”

“I think the important takeaway is that this category is continuing to grow off of a larger base,” said Chris Funari, communications manager for Athletic Brewing. “Even though we’re seeing more brands enter the category and we’re seeing increasing growth rate, this is a long-term trend. That really provides a lot of confidence for us and for other brands in the category that consumers want these products.”

Although the emerging trend for young people is positive in terms of alcohol use and Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), it is not a problem that will disappear; it is an addictive drug that has become an accepted part of the culture, offered at nearly any event, and that means that there will always be problems, and those problems may not get the kind of attention and notice as more illicit drugs, like opioids, that rapidly form addictions and can lead to rapid death.

Instead, the descent into alcoholism can be more drawn out and slower to kill or cause harm. In that way, it’s a bit more insidious, and less out in the open, despite the staggering numbers. For Brooke Berlet, and many others, bringing the message of sobriety to others and counseling them on recovery has given her life a new-found sense of purpose.

“If somebody told me four years ago, nearly to this day, that I’d be sitting at Manchester hospital having a conversation with someone about alcoholism I would have been like, where’s my drink?” Berlet said. “But I don’t have to live that way and people don’t have to live like that anymore and that’s the message that I want to carry into the community. There’s no shame is asking for help.”

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