Editorial standards.

Independence

No clinic, detox unit, aftercare provider, secondary residential, broker, fellowship or medication supplier pays for anything on this site. No referral fee, commission, finder's fee, retainer, advertising, sponsorship, affiliate arrangement or hospitality has ever been accepted from any of them, and none will be. There is no arrangement under which a provider can appear here, improve its position here, or have criticism removed. No clinic is named as the best one and no success rates are published, because in this industry they are almost never independently verified.

The site is funded by network membership, which is bought and managed at the network console. That is the entire commercial relationship, and it is with the reader rather than with the industry the site writes about. There is no advertising and no data is sold.

The membership model, stated plainly

Membership is one annual membership across the network, handled by the console rather than by this site. No price is written into this site or spoken by the AI guide, and no page here is authorised to state one: the current figure lives on the join page, because a price copied into a page is a price that goes stale and becomes a promise nobody meant to make.

There is no one-off unlock, no trial, no tier, no timer and no countdown. Nothing on this site is dressed up as scarcity. Nothing commercial is shown to somebody who is drunk, ashamed, frightened, grieving or writing in the middle of a bad night — the guide drops the subject entirely in that state, and if it is unsure it assumes it. Safety responses are never shortened, never gated, and never counted against any allowance.

Where this site's authority comes from, and where it stops

James went into Delamere, a residential treatment centre in Cheshire, in June 2020, after twenty-seven years of daily drinking, and has not drunk since. He was born in Manchester in 1976 and spent about thirty years headhunting travel and hospitality executives before that. He then ran Casa Salvia in Tenerife for several years, a guest house where many guests were in recovery, from several countries and several treatment systems, at every stage from weeks out to decades. Casa Salvia has been sold; no stay, hosting or accommodation is offered by this site or by the guide.

That is lived experience and close observation. It is not clinical training, and it is never presented as a substitute for it. Personal material is attributed to James and labelled as observation rather than evidence.

Declared conflict

James was a paying patient at Delamere, a residential treatment centre in Cheshire, in 2020. That is the origin of this work and it is a conflict, so it is declared wherever it could matter. That centre gets no favourable treatment here, is not named as the best, and is described on the same basis as any other. He holds no shareholding, directorship, equity, board seat or advisory role at any treatment facility, broker, aftercare provider or referral business, and has no paid role at any addiction-related organisation. If any of that changes, this page changes first and says so at the top.

Where figures come from, and which country they describe

The claim this site leans on most — that of the people who drink again in the year after residential treatment, most do so in the first ninety days — is sourced on the home page to published treatment-outcomes work rather than asserted. Any figure that is a range assembled from published information and direct enquiry is labelled as a range and dated in the text.

Nothing here assumes the reader is British. The country a figure or a named service comes from is stated, because services, prescribing routes, insurance and emergency numbers differ everywhere and a British answer given to somebody in Ohio or Málaga is a wrong answer. The AI guide asks where a visitor is before answering anything that depends on it.

Nothing here invents a statistic. Where a number is not known, this site says so.

Reference material is published once, not everywhere

This site does not print its own encyclopedia. Sourced reference pages on withdrawal, medication routes, what the treatment market costs, brokers, the fellowships and what helps a family are published in one place across this network: the encyclopedia on sober.guide, which is the sister guide for the decision to stop drinking. Publishing the same article under two domains is duplication dressed up as depth, and it makes both copies harder to correct.

What this site will not publish

• Any taper, dose, medication schedule, timetable or home detox. Alcohol withdrawal can kill and that belongs to a doctor who can see you.
• Any instruction to stop drinking suddenly.
• Any telephone number, including emergency and crisis numbers. They differ by country, they change, and a wrong number is worse than none. Routes are described instead: your local emergency number, a doctor, urgent medical care, a local crisis line.
• A diagnosis, a severity rating, a personal risk estimate, or the word alcoholic applied to a reader.
• A named recommendation of one clinic, programme or fellowship over another.
• Success rates, or before-and-after stories used as persuasion.
• A day count treated as a score, or anybody else's recovery used as a device for making a point.
• Medical facts about other substances generalised from alcohol. The thinking transfers; the physiology does not.

How the AI guide is governed

The guide runs on a written brief that sets out what it may and may not say, and that brief is held to the same rules as these pages. It may not diagnose, rate severity, instruct a detox, name a best clinic or state any price. It discloses in its first line that it is an AI and not James. A separate safety check runs on every message; where it fires, the ordinary conversation stops and the safety routes are given instead.

The guide is an AI and can be wrong. It says so on every page it appears on, and nothing typed into it is monitored by a person.

Corrections

If something here is wrong it gets changed rather than defended, on the page where the error was. Anything material — a sourced figure, a clinical statement, a claim about a provider — is corrected within seven days of being shown to be wrong, and a significant correction carries a dated note on the page. Tell the site through the AI guide or through the contact route at the network console. This applies to facts, sources and dates; it does not apply to James's opinions, which you are welcome to disagree with.

Every page here is written or edited by James Roberts. AI assistance is used in drafting and review. Nothing is published without a named human reading it.