[tea-lover]

I'm in the former USSR; this thing is very popular among alcoholics I know personally or have heard of from friends and relatives:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кодирование_от_алкоголизма

The article in Russian is much more thorough than the English one, run it through Google Translate or something.

There are various ways it's practiced in my area, all of them can be summarized as follows: a medical professional performs some procedure (sometimes just hypnosis, but it can get more physical), which either "cures" your alcoholism, or convinces you that you're going to die horribly if you have even a drop of alcohol. The process depends on who is doing it.

It's basically just placebo and is pretty useless in practice (most alcoholics I know haven't stopped drinking for more than a couple of months), which doesn't prevent it from being widely used.

[IlikeKitties]

That seems insanely dangerous. As far as I know, once you are physically addicted to alcohol, you can't even go cold turkey without risk of literally dying.

[Yizahi]

Proper (most) of the facilities which do this require people to stop drinking for at least few days before procedure, and some offer paid service isolating patient for a few days under supervision, and then do a block. In cases when patient is already delirious from intoxication these facilities can force one to go cold turkey, but at the same time put patient on the IV with some supplements and issue anti-psychotics (by doctors of course).

So in general the system is well equipped to not allow patients die from abstaining.

[tea-lover]

If you get DTs after drinking for months, you will get proper medical treatment as in any other country. The "coding" is usually performed after you have been sober for some time and "stabilized", so to say.

[Yizahi]

This is why ex-USSR countries have so many programmers - we did a lot of coding :)