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It will come as no surprise that, like resolutions, many more Americans vow to participate in Dry January than end up doing so, or at least fall off the wagon before February arrives:
- In 2023, 41% of alcohol drinkers said they were somewhat or very likely to participate in Dry January, but only 16% did, according to a CivicScience survey.
Now Cann, which makes beverages that contain both the THC and the CBD found in marijuana and hemp, is promoting itself as a way to keep the party going while abstaining from alcohol.
Jack pot: “I Cann shut up about doing Dry January,” a post from the brand’s Instagram account proclaimed on January 3. The brand has also promoted the monthlong alcohol-free pledge as “Cannuary.”
Cann co-founder Jake Bullock told Retail Brew that while his product is “not a vitamin” and that cannabis is verboten in many addiction programs including Alcoholics Anonymous, “we are an alcohol alternative.”
Possibly because of Dry January, the brand is seeing a sales surge:
- In the first 10 days of January, wholesale orders were up 56% over the same period in December, Bullock said.
Sip-pery slope: When Civic Science asked Gen Z Dry January participants in another survey what they were enjoying instead of alcohol, the most popular response was cannabis (34%), followed by non-alcoholic beverages (25%), and soda or seltzer (20%). (Only 10% said they weren’t replacing alcohol with anything.)
But some think consuming cannabis violates the spirit of Dry January, since it’s substituting one intoxicant for another.
Both alcohol and cannabis “are associated with harms and both can lead to addiction,” Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, told Bloomberg.
Drunk history: January notwithstanding, Bullock said that most Cann customers enjoy alcohol, too.
“Our best customers are way over-indexed on alcohol consumption,” Bullock said. “What we do, though, is we take their alcohol consumption from being way over-indexed and we kind of bring it [down] to around average. And that’s probably a good thing.”
“You can leave hangovers in the past,” Cann’s website declares. “Hemp-infused drinks still give you a buzz, but without the vomit, headaches, or 4am texts to your ex.”