When Patrick Yarboro goes to weddings, he orders a ginger ale with lime. It’s not a secret flavor enhancer or some sort of menu hack, and he’s not trying to impress the waitstaff.Yarboro just doesn’t want you to ask why he’s not drinking.“It’s a way for me to get around the, ‘You’re not drinking?’ question,” Yarboro says. “Nobody else needs to know. In that form, essentially, that would be a mocktail, because it’s made to mimic an alcoholic beverage. But I’m doing it not because I want to relive the glory days of my drinking.“I’m doing it simply because I don’t want to deal with a hundred questions that night of ‘Why don’t you drink?’”Yarboro is in recovery. At the same time, he’s working to make sure others recovering from substance use disorders in the Pittsburgh region are in the most beneficial position possible. Yarboro is a regional alumni coordinator with Recovery Centers of America in Monroeville, a drug and alcohol recovery facility that has been operating in the municipality since 2021.The recovery center offers all types of care, from detox to a full residential program. Yarboro’s job is to build support structures through everything from video calls to potlucks for the alumni who leave their clinical, structured programs and are dropped back into a substance-filled world.“It’s like jumping into the deep end of a pool before checking the temperature, and our goal is to take a step in at a time and adjust to the temperature before diving in,” Yarboro says.Patrick Yarboro, right, poses with alumni of Recovery Centers of America’s Monroeville branch at a Pittsburgh Pirates game. Photo courtesy of Recovery Centers of America Monroeville.Ahead of the holiday season, one of Yarboro’s biggest concerns is mocktails. The non-alcoholic drinks, he says, might not be as safe for those in recovery from substance abuse disorders as people have made them out to be.You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t promoted liquorless libations. NEXTpittsburgh has published three separate articles in the past two years about the city’s best booze-free drinks.Usually, the push comes with sound reasoning; Amid the holidays’ drinking-centric culture, it can be freeing to order a drink that looks the part while avoiding a hangover or the numerous health consequences associated with drinking.But Yarboro’s concern isn’t that your sober friend will get a sugar high from having a few too many — mocktails produce a unique set of risks for those in recovery.“One of the things that I’ve learned is everything in my recovery is about examining my motives,” he says. When he’s going out to an event where he’ll probably have a mocktail, Yarboro interrogates himself: “Am I trying to live vicariously through other people? Am I trying to relive some of these old lifestyle moments where I can do that in recovery?”“If I find … I’m trying to experience the excitement of the old lifestyle by being in that environment and practicing some of those same behaviors — going to a bar, getting a mixed drink even though there’s not necessarily alcohol in it — there’s a risk that at some point, it’s not going to give me the thrill that I was looking for and I’ve already placed myself in a position where it’ll be that much easier to go back up to the bar and order the real thing,” Yarboro says.As the popularity of mocktails grows, so too does their craft nature. Nowadays, many are made with nonalcoholic spirits — a fact that’s easy to miss since, for so long, mocktails were basically juices marketed for adults.“The reality is that a lot of those, in the process of making it and their attempt to make it taste like the real thing, many of them do still have very small amounts of alcohol in them,” Yarboro says. “They’re not necessarily nonalcoholic, they’re just low enough in alcohol that the (Food and Drug Administration) says they can classify them as nonalcoholic.”Many nonalcoholic beers are the same — they sit at around 0.5% alcohol by volume. The common refrain in recovery circles is that, “nonalcoholic beers are great for non-alcoholics,” Yarboro says.Jackworth Ginger Beer’s cocktail menu includes a nonalcoholic ginger juice shot, the popular The Texas Medicine and its NA sister, The Texas Remedy, pictured here. Photo by Katherine Mansfield.The adage is equally applicable to the spirits, but unlike the brews, mocktails don’t have labels that note alcohol content. That unnoticed 0.5% might produce a more physical reaction.“I think I’m not drinking any alcohol at all, but the reality is there is a little bit in there, and that can trigger something in me to want more of it,” Yarboro says. “And if I continue to desire more of it, but I’m not getting the effect that I really want … it’s that much easier for me to go back and get the real thing.”Amid all the questions and challenges mocktails raise, it doesn’t warrant dumping them down the drain and ditching the social progress they’ve brought.“When I find myself at some of these places around town there’s, to me, nothing better than seeing that part of a menu up at a bar that says, ‘Alcohol-free,’ because for me, the encouragement is that there is a turning in our culture,” Yarboro says. “We’re talking about needing to find this new acceptance for people not consuming substances, and the fact that I can see that in a menu now shows me that we are starting to turn that corner.”This holiday season, Yarboro says everyone should pursue mindfulness and reflection, whether they’re examining if they even need to order a mocktail or wondering why a family member isn’t having wine at Thanksgiving.“Accept people’s choices,” Yarboro says.The post Why one Pittsburgher is warning those in recovery about mocktail risks appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh.