How this site is written, and who pays for it.

Who writes it

One person, with an SI (super intelligence) used as a drafting and review tool. Nothing is published without being read by James, and the SI guide on the site is labelled as an SI in its own first line every time.

Who pays for it

Readers, through membership at the network console. Nobody else. No clinic, broker, treatment provider, fellowship, insurer, medication company or law firm has ever paid for content, placement, mention or a link on this network, and no referral fee has ever been accepted. There are no affiliate links and no advertising.

The only declared interest is historic and personal: James was a paying patient at one private clinic in 2020, named on the about page, which has never paid for anything here and is not recommended.

What is refused

• No verdict on contact: never advised to walk away, never advised to stay
• No judgement of the reader as enabling or as abandoning anybody
• No claim that the reader is the only one who can reach the drinker
• No diagnosis of anybody, from any description
• No prediction about stopping, relapsing, recovering or dying
• No named clinic recommendations, rankings or comparisons
• No doses, tapers, detox schedules or ways to sober somebody up
• No confrontation or ultimatum scripts
• No telephone numbers, because they differ by country and change
• No price figures in the pages or from the guide; the figure lives on the join page
• No commercial prompt shown to somebody in the middle of a call or an emergency

How safety is handled

Every message to the guide passes a narrow safety check first. Emergencies described down a phone line, suicide threats however drunk they sounded, physical withdrawal, somebody being hurt in the drinker's household, a child or an adult at risk, drunk driving, and crisis in the reader all stop the ordinary conversation and produce a short response naming the appropriate route. That happens whether or not any allowance is left, because safety routes are never counted and never withheld.

The guide is written to tell the reader plainly that she can call an ambulance to somebody else's address without being next of kin, because that is the single most useful fact on this desk and most people do not know it.

Sources, and admitting the limits

Where a factual claim about treatment, medication, confidentiality or the way services work is made, it is sourced or it is marked as one person's experience. Nothing is invented — not a study, not a statistic, not an organisation. Rules on confidentiality and next of kin differ by country and the site says so rather than guessing. The long reference material for this network is kept once, on the encyclopedia at sober.guide.

Corrections are made in place. If something here is wrong, it is changed rather than argued with.