In this personal blog, Cassie, a lived experience campaigner and advocate, shares her family’s experience of alcohol addiction and how online alcohol delivery apps have made alcohol easier than ever to access. She reflects on how a system built for convenience is failing to protect people at their most vulnerable, and considers what needs to be done about it.
This is my story of watching my uncle suffer—a stark reminder that the current (licensing) system is failing people with alcohol dependence and the families who support them.
Losing my mum to alcoholism a decade ago broke my heart, and now seeing my uncle trapped in the same nightmare has been gut-wrenching. He’s a man with deep mental health struggles, and his addiction has nearly killed him countless times. Even now, in remission, the constant urge to order alcohol through online apps haunts him daily.
Delivery services make access to alcohol terrifyingly simple
Ten years ago, I’d run to local shops like Thresher and off-licences, begging them not to serve my mum. Today, it’s so much worse—delivery services make access to alcohol terrifyingly simple, delivering unlimited bottles to his door in under an hour with just a few taps on his phone. He didn’t need to move, spending upwards of £50–£70 a day, sometimes on eight bottles of wine or more, while spending nothing on food. That’s why, by December 2024, he’d lost the ability to walk (something he later had to relearn), his addiction fed without any effort or oversight.
I’ve seen him open the door to deliveries, barely able to speak, yet these services kept supplying him without hesitation. “Dark alcohol stores” on the apps charged triple what a sober person would pay, and dodgy sellers on Gumtree did the same, charging exorbitant amounts for a single bottle—all preying on his vulnerability in ways that feel like assisted suicide, with companies profiting while he spiralled into self-destruction.
Even in hospital, while fighting to survive but in the grips of addiction, he was able to order alcohol, and the apps didn’t stop to query this. We contacted the supermarket directly, pleading with them to block or deny his orders—multiple deliveries a day of extreme amounts of alcohol—but they refused to act, showing no interest in intervening despite clear signs of his intoxication, vulnerability, and physical deterioration.
Policies to protect people are falling short
These delivery services talk about age checks and policies such as not handing over alcohol to intoxicated people, but in practice they fall short. Drivers aren’t properly trained or empowered to refuse, and there’s no system to flag repeat high-volume orders from vulnerable customers.
While it’s illegal in the UK to knowingly sell alcohol to someone who’s intoxicated, enforcement for deliveries is weak, allowing services to enable harmful drinking without real consequences. The system as a whole fails people like him: rehab demands sobriety first, but addiction and mental health issues make that nearly impossible, leading to a vicious cycle of A&E visits for quick fixes, draining NHS resources. My twin sister, an ambulance service paramedic, sees this daily—no long-term solutions, just endless emergency calls that exhaust everyone.
How can we help someone when access to alcohol is so simple? These delivery services don’t help—they make it worse by prioritising convenience and profit over basic safeguards, turning a blind eye to the destruction they enable, even when someone is visibly falling apart.
We need new laws to reflect how alcohol is actually sold and consumed today
This experience highlights a wider policy failure: the laws that control alcohol sales have not kept up with the rapid growth of online alcohol delivery services. This has left clear gaps in safeguards, with people like my uncle falling through the cracks. His experience, and the experiences of so many other families too, shows that there is now an urgent need to revisit these laws to address how alcohol is actually sold and consumed today.
Licenced premises have a duty of care and can refuse to serve somebody who is already intoxicated, but since the pandemic people are buying most of their alcohol to drink at home. To reflect this and to protect those who are most vulnerable, we need stronger controls on delivery times for home alcohol orders, limits on the quantity that can be delivered in a single order, and tighter restrictions on price promotions.
We also urgently need a national alcohol strategy that better protects everyone. This means addressing how affordable, readily available and relentlessly marketed alcohol currently is, and ensuring that proper investment in treatment and recovery services means those suffering the most harms from alcohol are able to access life-saving treatment and support, when and where they need it.
Without these changes, more families will face the same preventable suffering I have witnessed with my uncle.
Written by Cassie, lived experience campaigner and advocate.
This blog was published with the permission of the author. The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alcohol Health Alliance or its members.
