Some of the AA faithful are real fanatics when it comes to medications; they want to pretty much ban them entirely. They are pretty sure that if you are taking anything, that you are just substituting one drug for another. They believe that people should be able to recover from anything and everything with just the Twelve Steps, and God's help. In this respect, they are very much like the Christian Scientists who won't go to the doctor, or take their children to the doctor, even if they are dying. Sometimes those AA fanatics do great harm, like when they tell neophytes to stop taking their doctor-prescribed medications, and the neophytes get sick, or worse.

As Gary Persip points out in Recovery From Addiction Without God?¹:

I have even heard sponsors advising those they sponsor to refrain from using medications that were prescribed by professionals and, presumably, deemed necessary for the treatment of other medical or psychological problems of the individuals. Occasionally, sponsees will admit that they haven't informed their sponsors of medically prescribed drugs they are taking for fear of a critical response.

Medications of any kind are disparaged, and any diagnosis of disorder other than the Big Books disease concept of alcoholism meets with strong opposition. The parallel with "faith healing" should be obvious and the same pitfalls are present. To such individuals, there is no such thing as clinical depression.

The many deaths that have been attributed to failure to obtain adequate medical treatment observed among family members of a number of "natural" religious groups comes to mind as a parallel case. How many disasters, including death, has this misguided practice of AA members contributed to? On what basis do so many AA members assume that they are qualified to advise on matters for which they have no training? The practice, as has been noted, is in sharp contradiction to those Traditions that state that we share only our experiences, strength and hopes with one another, not our opinions.

...an Elder with 35 years told a newcomer, a young man, his sobriety was no good because he was taking medication for high blood pressure. The newcomer, on the advice of the Elder, quit his medication, had a stroke, and is now crippled for life.

Now that's grim. And there are even more grim stories, far too many stories of people with mental problems being talked into quitting their medications, and then committing suicide.³

But sometimes, the anti-drug fanaticism of the faithful reaches comic proportions.

In the March 23, 1998 issue of New Yorker magazine, David Samuels wrote an article titled, "Saying Yes to Drugs"⁴. It starts with the hilarious story of the coffee war at Hazelden. Hazelden is the richest, most affluent, and most influential twelve-step-based drug and alcohol treatment facility in the country. It should be rich, just a 28-day stay costs $15,000. In the spring of 1994, the faithful counselors at Hazelden decided that coffee was a drug, just like any other drug, and that it should be strengsten verboten.

"There was concern that some people could be using coffee as a stimulant, three-bagging it, or four-bagging it," Russell Forrest, one of the leaders of the anti-coffee camp, recalled. "What we were really dealing with, I guess, was a question of philosophy."

A question of philosophy, indeed. The 12-step religion has become more extreme in their opposition to any kind of mind-altering chemicals than even the Mormons or the Seventh Day Adventists.

Coffee was banned at Hazelden. This will undoubtedly strike some people as both very extreme and very odd, considering that coffee and cigarettes have been considered essential elements of AA meetings since the dawn of AA time, in Akron, Ohio. The AA faithful can still make the pilgrimage to Akron, to see Doctor Bob's famous coffee pot, the one with which he brewed up the coffee for the original group of AA members. And Doctor Bob is often quoted as saying, "All we need for another meeting is a resentment and a pot of coffee."

Bill Wilson was certainly not so fundamentally opposed to drugs. He experimented with things like using vitamin B3 megadoses as a treatment for alcoholism until the General Services Board considered him to be an embarrassment, and asked him to stop using the GSB for his return address. (Kind of funny, isn't it? Bill creates them, and makes them what they are, and then they tell him that he's embarrassing them, so please go away.)

Nevertheless, at Hazelden, coffee had become an illegal drug. But the coffeeholic patients did not go quietly into that night. No, they decided to rage, rage, against the dying of the light. People smuggled in coffee and coffee concentrates. When patients' belongings were searched, very strange contraband started showing up.

"You had people bringing this stuff in from outside," Forrest recalls, "and there was an underground market, which, of course, you would point out to patients, and you'd say, you know, 'Doesn't this sound like chemical use?' People were opening up packages, and I saw what was in there. It was the strongest brew you could buy. Somebody was getting coffee from South America, and it was sticky and black, and I said, 'What is this? This is not Maxwell House from Bogota.'"

Oh, my God, it's Black Tar Columbian! Not heroin, but coffee!

The black market grew rapidly, and people were secretly brewing up batches of coffee in their rooms, and then flushing the incriminating evidence, the grounds, down sinks and toilets. Pretty soon, the pipes were stuffed with coffee grounds, and drains were backing up all over Hazelden. The conflict between the fundamentalist approach to the tenets of AA and the practical demands of running a treatment center came to a head. As the plumbing at Hazelden became more and more clogged, the maintenance staff rebelled. Finally, the coffee ban was ingloriously rescinded, much to the consternation of some of the staff, and those darned coffee addicts were able to get their fixes again without being criminals.

The author of the New Yorker article, David Samuels, pointed out that the coffee war was happening at about the same time as a much larger drug debate was happening at Hazelden. Foundation President Jerry Spicer had begun to encourage the use of antidepressant drugs, and other therapies that are not part of the traditional twelve-step process. Thus Spicer was a progressive, putting Hazelden at odds with more conservative, fundamentalist, 12-step facilities like the Betty Ford clinic. And it put Spicer at odds with some of his own staff -- half a dozen counselors quit in protest when Spicer approved of the tranquilizers. For them, allowing both coffee and tranquilizers seems to have been just too much of a departure from a purely spiritual treatment program.

President Spicer was actually hoping that there was some progress being made in the area of treating alcoholism. He had some reasons to be optimistic.

Alan Leshner is certainly optimistic. Dr. Leshner is the head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, or NIDA, the federal agency that controls about 85% of all government addiction-research funding. Leshner talked about a new class of drugs, which are a consequence of recent research into the way neurotransmitters in the brain affect behavior, and how they will act on addiction in much the same way as S.S.R.I.s (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors), like Prozac and Zoloft, act on depression. Leshner said, "My belief is that today, in 1998, you should be put in jail if you refuse to prescribe S.S.R.I.s for depression. I also believe that five years from now you should be put in jail if you don't give crack addicts medications we're working on now."

Leshner continued, "Look, if swinging a dead cat over your head helps, then I'm all for it. But if someone says never, ever use medications, I can't understand that at all."

There has also been progress in understanding alcoholism as a disease. There are an amazing number of people working on different aspects of the problem, and coming up with results. The whole area is very much in flux, and changing by the month. The latest evidence shows that alcoholism is indeed a disease, just like AA has been saying all along. More and more, the scientists are finding anomalies in the brain chemistry of alcoholics, and anomalies in their genes. Scientists are making discoveries like finding that the A1 allele of the dopamine receptor gene seems to play a large part in susceptibility to alcoholism and drug addiction. And the terms "D2-D4" and "exon 3 of dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) gene" are popping up more and more often in connection with alcoholism. There is mounting evidence that alcoholics feel more pain and less pleasure than other people, a condition that they try to fix with alcohol or other drugs.

Alcoholism and some other addictions and compulsions have in common the inability to achieve satisfaction from limited quantities of a pleasure stimulus. This inability, "reward deficiency syndrome," is hard-wired into the brain and appears to be linked to a genetic variation in the D2 receptor of chromosome 11.
See Blum⁵

For a bewildering overload of information, just use an Internet search engine, and search for terms like "alcoholism and allele", or "alcoholism and dopamine", or "alcoholism and gene". The results are so high-tech that a master's degree in biology or biochemistry would help to understand it all, but it is there anyway, and it indicates just how much work is being done on solving the puzzle of alcoholism. This area of investigation is hot, and a lot is happening fast, and new information is being collected rapidly. The recent sequencing of the human genome has added yet one more tool to the investigator's toolbox.

And the evidence also suggests that there may eventually be a cure, or at least an effective medical treatment, for alcoholism. We have reason to be optimistic. But that is a direct violation of a dearly-held AA tenet. One of the core components of AA dogma is the idea that alcoholism is incurable. Because modern medicine has no cure and the situation is hopeless, the only answer, they say, is to try the supernatural solution: surrender yourself to God, and practice the Twelve Steps and go to meetings forever, and hope that God will keep you sober.

But now modern medicine threatens to upset the apple cart.

Really, someone in AA should have seen this one coming. The Big Book has always described alcoholism as a disease, "an actual disease that had a name and symptoms like diabetes or cancer or TB." Well, we have medical treatments for all of those other actual diseases, even cancer, and none of the treatments for those other diseases involves prayer and confessions, or going to meetings for the rest of your life... With those other "actual" diseases, you don't see articles written by AA and NA boosters, talking about the necessity of treating the patients' mind, body, and spirit, by sending the patients to AA and NA meetings for the beneficial effects.⁶

I am getting feelings of deja vu all over again. Wasn't this in a movie about a white doctor going to Borneo, and getting into a battle with the local witch doctor, over whose magic really worked? The witch doctor was loosing believers to the western doctor every time the western guy healed somebody, and the witch doctor didn't like that at all, so he conspired to kill the white guys. See The Spiral Road, a novel by Jan DeHartog, and a movie starring Burl Ives and Rock Hudson. (Available on late-night TV or at your local videotape rental store. Warning: Over all, it's a pretty good movie, and the evil witch doctor's scheme to kill the western doctors is fiendishly clever and really spooky, but the ending features a hokey religious conversion of the agnostic younger white doctor (Rock Hudson) which is enough to make you gag. We just can't seem to get away from somebody trying to convert us, can we? I mean, really, how is it that there are so many people around with nothing better to do with their lives than try to convert me to their religion? What did they do for entertainment before I got here?)

The high priests of AA don't want to discuss any new developments. They don't want you to even hear about any new treatments, never mind a cure. As Gary Persip points out in Recovery From Addiction Without God?:

The very AA Traditions that curtail members from presenting information or sharing with one another from a "professional" standpoint during meetings effectively act to keep AA groups ignorant of current findings in addiction studies; they are assumed to have no place in the program of recovery. This cry of "professionalism" was originally designed to ensure the equality of all participants in the program of recovery, AA traditionally being based upon one drunk sharing his or her experience, strength, and hope with another. The current fellowship of AA, however, has diverged in so many regards from the original program that any information that sounds as if it were based upon professional opinion comes to be regarded as suspect and is, therefore, discouraged. Anything above the level of a drunkalog is met with a stern admonition to "keep it simple." Neither is any current information on addiction research presented in the Grapevine, the official publication of the organization. Dissident cries from members, when permitted to be published, are mild and fully supportive of maintaining the traditional focus.

And what if there is a cure for alcoholism? There will no longer be any need to grovel before an authoritarian God for the rest of your life. Just pop a pill. Why waste your time doing the Twelve Steps, and forever listing and confessing all of your faults and short-comings? Why waste a big chunk of the rest of your life going to an endless series of meetings? Why make yourself into a bonkers babbling believer in a crazy contentious cult? Indeed, if a simple pill can fix the problem, why would anyone want to pay Hazelden, or any other treatment facility, ten or fifteen thousand dollars for a month of spiritual treatment? The AA Twelve-Step treatment program will be relegated to the trash heap of history, along with other old medical treatments like witchcraft, blood-letting, and leaches. The show is over, drop the curtain, and would the last one out of the rooms please turn off the lights?

No wonder the high priests of AA, and their faithful followers, don't seem to want there to be a cure for alcoholism, and they don't seem to want to see any new drugs used in the treatment of alcoholism. They have no desire to see their game end. They like the game. It has worked for them. They achieved sobriety through it. It has made them successful and important. So the priests continue to chant, "There is no cure for alcoholism. There will never be a cure for alcoholism. Nobody ever recovers. Nobody ever graduates from this program. Just do the Twelve Steps, and keep coming back to meetings, forever."

But the chanting may come to an end. I hope the end comes soon.

2) A cult checklist: http://www.morerevealed.com/checklist.jsp

And if you are in the market for cult checklists, try mine.

3) AA Horror Stories Rebecca Fransway, 2000. See Sharp Press,Tucson, AZ. ISBN 1-884365-24-8

4) For the full text of the New Yorker magazine article, see: Saying Yes to Drugs; by David Samuels, New Yorker, Volume 74, March 23, 1998. pp 48-9+.

5) Kenneth Blum and others, Reward Deficiency Syndrome, The American Scientist, March-April 1996.
See http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/articles/96articles/Blum-full.html for the full article.

6) See The Role of Spirituality in the Recovery Process, Paul DiLorenzo, Raymond Johnson, and Marian Bussey; Child Welfare, Mar/Apr 2001, Vol. 80 Issue 2, p257, 17p. for a classic example of this AA-booster school of literature.

After a confused look at the problem of drink- or drug-using parents from the AA point of view, including a section on "Responding to the Spiritual Crisis" -- not, "Responding to the Emotional Crisis" or "Psychological Crisis" or "Mental Crisis" -- the authors conclude that spiritual practices like attending AA or NA meetings will help the patients.

The article features such ridiculously lame pseudo-science as

The cerebrum and cerebral cortex (white matter) make the human brain unique and are the source of our abilities to understand, communicate, and create [Ornstein & Thompson 1984]. The white matter assists in making decisions and explains much of the human behavior patterns.

Available on the Internet through your public library's EBSCO periodicals database.

Last updated 29 May 2001.

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