"But if I think of AA meetings all I can think is that I'd need to drink to go ." So? You'd hardly be worse off, would you? I have, in the past, gone from a pub to a meeting to another pub. This was 20 miles from home - I had gone to that town to go to a meeting that night. A meeting was obviously what I needed, or i'd have gone to my local or just stayed in. Happy to say that now I go to meetings without the drinking, but not going in case you drink would have been an excuse for me.
Chink (and others) - not knocking "pills and potions" as I'm sure you know. What I was getting at was that alcoholism (or, indeed, problem drinking) is not just drinking too much. Loads of people drink too much. So, when the time comes, they stop. They do it without pills, potions, counselling, AA or a Roman Catholic exorcism. They just put the drink down.
The need for any of these extra things, I would say, is a good clue that the problem is not that we drink too much - it's that we can't HELP drinking too much. It's a mental problem, not an over-flexible elbow.
As such, anything that only addresses the physical, while helpful (and you will have seen on threads like this a dozen physical tricks for beating the craving) risks falling short at the most crucial moment. Something more is needed to fix the mental obsession.
For me and many like me it was AA. For others it's counselling, religious, threads like this, or all sorts of other stuff. But most people need SOMETHING.
A couple of weeks ago you were saying that Antabuse wouldn't let you drink because of the timing and the breath tests. You've now found a way to beat that particular system - just don't show up.
Keep at the pills, as someone else said, and don't beat yourself up, because you're doing fantastically well - but please don't kid yourself that this is a purely physical problem with a purely physical remedy.