The answer is yes and no. If you believe it will work, and you are already motivated to change, then the drugs will have their desired placebo effect. If, however, you really still pine to get drunk and/or high, you will simply be frustrated that you can no longer feel high while taking your Vivitrol or Nalterxone. Drugs, be they illicit or legal, do not change the content of our thoughts, and therefore cannot change what we already want. These drugs are a placebo with side effects and nothing more. Take a look at a bit of research that comes from Chapter 2 of The Freedom Model for Addictions:

A recent study comparing naltrexone, a drug used to reduce substance cravings, to a placebo resulted in a shockingly similar curve (Oslin et al., 2015). You can see in this graph that the placebo groups, those people taking a pill that contained no medication, reduced their drinking as much as those taking the medication. What’s more, all groups reduced their average drinking at the beginning of the study and maintained this average throughout the following 12 weeks of treatment. Again, treatment gets the credit, when in fact the receipt of treatment simply coincides with people’s choice to change. Naltrexone is currently being hailed as a miracle drug for addiction, yet its success is an illusion, a misattribution. The fact that the placebo groups did just as well makes this crystal clear.