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Copyright © 2001, A. Orange I just can't resist: This is a searching and fearless moral inventory of Alcoholics Anonymous.
1) It doesn't work. We can do better than this. This is the year 2001, and we can come up with a better answer to alcoholism than "abandon yourself to God." Not only does it not work, but it kills as many people as it saves. That is a very strong damnation, but the numbers back it up. There are always lots of AA defenders who will swear that AA saved their lives, but all objective, fair tests of AA that have been performed show no better success rate than no treatment at all. The only possible mathematical explanation is that AA kills one patient for each one that it saves, thus making the numbers balance out. And that is, in fact, highly believable, given just how bad the treatment really is. Read on.
2) It's a lie. AA tells everyone who will listen that it has the only treatment program for alcoholism, but their Twelve-Step program does not work. Rather than even concede that the program might have some problems, the AA true believers just shove the program on every victim they can find, while simultaneously avoiding any and all scientific testing of the effectiveness of the Twelve-Step program. When some testing does occur, like in project MATCH, and gives results that they don't like, they just deny and ignore the results of the test. AA also lies about its success rate -- "never fails" really means "fails at least 95 percent of the time." AA has a higher attrition rate than the Bataan Death March. 3) It is bad religion. Any theologian will tell you that this is one very bad religion, a Gnostic heresy. It is surprising that any churches allow AA to meet in their buildings. I suspect that they haven't examined the theology very closely, and they just think that getting the drunkards praying is a good thing.
4) It features bad psychology and bad medicine. AA's dogma is based on myths about how the human mind and body works, not facts. Example: "Alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful." No, it isn't. Ethyl alcohol is a clear liquid, a hydrocarbon solvent, and it has no brain. It cannot think at all, never mind be cunning, baffling, and powerful. Giving people misinformation doesn't help them stay sober. Teaching people that they are powerless over alcohol, and cannot resist temptation and cravings, is very damaging, and almost guarantees relapses. Teaching people to expect God to take away their desire to drink is self-defeating and guarantees plenty of failures. Any competent doctor will tell you that a one-size-fits-all medical treatment program is a good way to kill a lot of patients.
5) The cult-like atmosphere drives away moderate help seekers. More than 90% of all of the people who walk in the door looking for help turn right around and walk right back out the door when they discover just how bad the religion is, and what kind of fanatics they are dealing with. This phenomenon is so well known that it is called the "revolving door effect." Some people are so appalled by the bombastic, grandiose religiosity that they decide they would rather risk drinking themselves to death than take the AA cure.
6) It is harmful to converts. No good comes of getting people to believe in a bunch of falsehoods, and do a bunch of ridiculous busywork that just wastes their time. It is also psychologically harmful -- especially the wallowing in guilt part -- to the point of driving some believers to suicide. The strange theology dooms people to relapses, because God doesn't fix all of the members' problems. Teaching people that they are powerless over alcohol guarantees big problems. And telling newcomers to quit taking their doctor-prescribed medications is killing people.
7) It is harmful to drop-outs. Even those who refuse to be converted, who leave instead, are often harmed by AA dogma. The most obvious example is convincing people that one drink will make them spin out of control, and they will go on a huge drinking binge. When people decide that they would rather drink than be religious fanatics, they then proceed to fulfill the AA prophesy. The few studies that have tracked various treatment programs' drop-outs and failures have found that AA "treatment" was worse than no treatment at all for those people; they had worse binges than the people who never got the indoctrination.
8) It encourages people to be illogical, superstitious, and irrational.
9) It is anti-intellectual, and encourages people to be stupid.
10) It totally ignores all social issues. AA says that the answer to all social problems is the Twelve Steps. AA will not look at any of the causes of alcoholism, like poverty, racism, lack of education, lack of opportunities, or injustice. This, combined with the anti-intellectualism listed above, makes the AA organization a corrupt politician's dream come true; those people just will not do anything to rock the boat or threaten the status quo. It is no surprise that Fascist dictators like AA in their countries, and Latin America is one of the biggest growth areas for AA.
11) It is a headstrong organization that refuses to allow any research into other treatments for alcoholism, some of which might actually work, just for a change. Again: We can do better than this. This is the year 2001, and we can come up with a better answer to alcoholism than "abandon yourself to God."
12) It illegally and immorally coerces people into joining the AA religion. The organization has a vast network of "counselors", "therapists", and other treatment professionals who routinely send all patients to AA as a standard part of the treatment program. AA also uses judges and parole officers to coerce people into AA. It is blatantly illegal and unconstitutional to force people to go to a religious church service. Half a dozen state and federal judges have ruled that Alcoholics Anonymous is a religion, but the system still sends treatment patients and criminal offenders to AA. Every American court that has ruled on the issue of compulsory AA attendance has ruled that AA is a religion, including the federal District Court for Southern New York, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, two state Supreme Courts -- New York and Tennessee, and the federal 7th Circuit Court in Wisconsin. Today, because of the judges' rulings, the coercion is often performed by deception: People are told that they must go to a certain number of recovery group meetings per week, or else, and they are handed a list of possible meetings, a list which contains only AA and NA groups. What they are not told is that they can also choose to go to Rational Recovery, SMART, SOS, WFS, or any other recovery group meetings that they can find. So, by default, almost everyone ends up at the twelve-step meetings.
13) It is dishonest. It uses hidden members and front groups like ASAM and NCADD to further its secret agenda, while pretending to be just another self-help group that doesn't want to get involved in controversy.
14) It is a haven for fanatics. It is routine for the true believers to dominate meetings, bragging about the amount of quality knee time that they rack up each day (praying on their knees), or delivering well-practiced sermons that declare that AA with the Twelve Steps is the only way to survive alcoholism, and that Bill Wilson was just the greatest genius to have made up twelve perfect steps that will solve all of the world's problems... And there is no way to get those nuts and smug hypocrites to shut up. Sure, you can walk out and go to a different meeting, but it will usually be the same thing over there.
15) It is a haven for sexual predators and other manipulative personalities. Once such people get (or claim) enough sober time to become sponsors, they can collect a harem or circle of sponsees, and run the sponsees lives and get pretty much whatever they want. And some blood-sucking insects do. Some sponsors have the reputation of getting every pretty young woman who joins the group, and there is even a slang name for such behavior, "thirteenth stepping" the girl. At the gay and lesbian meetings, the victims are of the same sex, or course. And again, the AA rules provide no simple way to get rid of such predators, because the only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking. The group can ask a victimizer to leave after he has become intolerably harmful to too many people, but he can just go to a different group. The anonymity of AA helps to hide the criminals.
16) It is a program of brutal victimization. AA wants people to hit bottom so that they will be easy to convert to the AA religion. AA people often say that alcoholics aren't much good for anything until they hit bottom, and can be made to surrender. Hard-ass sponsors will even say to people who refuse religious conversion as a condition of quitting drinking, "Maybe you should go back out and do some more research on the subject." Any doctor will tell you that waiting for someone to hit bottom maximizes the damage to the liver, kidneys, and brain, and is the worst possible way to handle alcoholism.
17) It isn't really anonymous or confidential. Anything you say can end up on the streets, or in a court of law. You can be blackmailed with what you say. Professional people, like politicians, doctors, and lawyers, are noticeably absent from meetings -- it would be professional suicide for them to publicly declare that they have an alcohol or drug problem.
18) It is arrogant. You don't get more than five minutes into any meeting before someone is reading a canned statement that says that anyone who doesn't make it in AA is "constitutionally dishonest." Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. AA never, not for a minute, considers the possibility that maybe AA isn't right for some people (never mind the idea that AA is wrong for most people). Again, AA claims that a one-size-fits-all fix, the Twelve-Step Program, is the answer to everything. And even more outrageously, the "fix" is to turn people into religiomaniacs -- religious fanatics. And, again, the real AA failure rate is 95 to 98 percent, and AA arrogantly claims that they all fail because they are all "incapable of being honest." 19) It aids and abets unrealistic blind faith. Mulder, on The X-Files, has a poster that says "I Want To Believe." That should be the motto of AA. Far too many people are in the position of just wanting to believe that it works, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, including the shrinking circle of friends and the mounting stack of dead bodies. Then they tell all newcomers "Keep coming back, it works!" and viciously attack anyone who points to the stack of dead bodies and questions whether it really works... Thus, AA also aids and abets a monomaniacal obsession with a single panacea, a twelve-step program. Just because you want to believe doesn't mean that you should believe, any more than the fact that you want to take a drink means that you should take a drink.
20) It is a genuine fanatical irrational
religious cult, not a quit-drinking program.
21) It's a pretend church. People who never made it through the seminary now get to play priest and lead the congregation in prayers. Unfortunately, they also get to lead the newcomers in everything else in their lives too, and play wise know-it-all spiritual teacher even if they are stupid jerks or cruel fools.
22) It's also pretend medicine. People with no medical qualifications or training whatsoever get to play both doctor and psychiatrist, sometimes with disastrous results, like when they decide to tell sponsees not to take their doctor-prescribed medications.
23) It is a culture of sickness. Members are expected to spend the rest of their lives going to meetings with a bunch of alcoholics, drug addicts, street criminals, convicts, and dogmatic religious fanatics, all of whom complain that they are powerless over their addictions, and that their lives have become unmanageable. Do you really want to have some loser alcoholic, who has failed to run his own life, for your sponsor, for your teacher and guru, determining the rest of your life? A far better treatment plan is to just quit drinking forever -- not "one day at a time" -- and then get out of the meetings, and go hang out with a bunch of healthy, successful people. Forget the "nobody understands us alcoholics but another alcoholic" nonsense. Do you want to be understood by a drunkard, or do you want to live happily? I am still noticing what a joy it is to talk to an attractive young woman about drug or alcohol problems, and hear her respond, "Oh, I don't do that kind of stuff. I think it would just mess me up..." Then we are free to talk about other stuff, like art, music, computers, children, or whatever... Anything but more stories of misery. Anything but more stories of drug and alcohol problems. 24) It is unnecessary. More people recover from alcoholism without AA and the Twelve Steps than do it with AA, several times over. More people recover without any support group of any kind than with one. AA won't tell you that; that's one of the biggest dirty little secrets AA has. AA dogma says, "Nobody can do it alone." The truth is, most people do it that way.
25) Nobody is responsible. When something goes wrong, and somebody is badly abused, misguided, or harmed in some way, there is no one to answer for anything. Nobody is really in charge. Every group is independent, and has no connection to any other, even if they are all doing the same thing. "No one speaks for AA", they say, so nobody can answer criticisms. Because nobody is responsible for anything, nobody can fix anything. Also, when a member relapses and dies, or commits suicide, nobody is responsible. AA blames the victim: The victim was just morally inferior, and constitutionally dishonest with himself. It is not the sponsor's fault. No matter what the sponsor did to the guy, the sponsor isn't responsible for anything. No way will AA accept even the tiniest bit of responsibility for the failures, even though it gleefully claims all of the credit for successes. 26) The dogma is frozen. The current crop of true believers smugly declare that they have all of the answers to alcoholism in the teachings of Bill W. and Doctor Bob, and that there is nothing more to discuss. That is not how Bill W. and Doctor Bob worked. They were very inquisitive and inclusive, not exclusive. Both of them learned everything they could about alcoholism from Dr. Silkworth, and they consulted with whatever other experts they could find, on a wide variety of subjects. Bill experimented with using megavitamin doses to treat alcoholism, and even tried LSD for the same reason. He never stopped looking for new answers. Alas, that isn't how the current high priests behave at all. They don't know the meanings of the words "investigate" or "experiment." They just arrogantly declare that their Twelve-Step program is the infallible answer to all of the world's ills.
27) AA uses fear, guilt, and lies to manipulate people. This is not a positive, life-affirming program. It is very negative to keep telling people that they will relapse and die unless they do everything right. And there is a lot to do right: not just the Twelve Steps with all of the self-criticism and guilt induction, but also attending lots of meetings, and complying with all of the accumulated "wisdom" like "you can't have any resentments", "stuff your feelings", and "do what your sponsor says." People become neurotic, they become mentally ill, if they spend too much of their time in states of fear and guilt. And AA tells a lot of lies, and myths, untruths, and fairy tales, to keep people trapped in fear and guilt.
28) No cross-talk. The term "cross-talk" means saying something in response to something somebody else said. That is forbidden at meetings. The original idea was to prevent put-downs or criticism of what someone said, to allow people to be as open and honest as possible. But now it just means that nobody gets any responses to anything they say. Hence there is no way to give anyone any feedback in a meeting. You can't tell people that they are going off the deep end, or babbling crazy nonsense, or mindlessly embracing fanatical dogma. Everybody is just talking to a blank wall, and gets no answers or comments back. Thus there is no brake to keep people from going off on a tangent. They can say anything they want to, no matter how fanatical or crazy, and everyone just sits there and silently accepts it. In any ordinary group, people cannot talk crazy for very long before somebody else will call them on it, and say, "Oh yeh? That sounds really goofy. Can you explain that? Can you prove that statement? Where did you hear that?" In AA meetings, they won't ever get called on anything. They will never get a reality check.
29) It is throw-away therapy for throw-away people. All of the city, state, and federal governments want to do "something" about the drug and alcohol problem, but they don't want to do much. So they just give a contract for drug and alcohol treatment to the lowest bidder, and ignore the problem for the rest of the year. And if the lowest bidder's therapy doesn't really work, well, what can you expect for so little money? To get something better would cost more, wouldn't it? And, of course, the cheapest treatment is free AA and NA meetings. 30) AA claims that it is the only way. Beginners are told that the Twelve-Step program is the only way to achieve sobriety, and that nothing else works. If the student believes that, then there is no reason to do anything else, or to study anything else, to help oneself, other than just do the Twelve Steps and do whatever the sponsor says. When the Twelve Steps don't work, the student has no other techniques or knowledge to use to prevent a relapse, so he relapses and sometimes dies drunk out in the streets. AA is quick to accuse all competing groups and recovery methods of killing patients, but maintains its own innocence. AA claims that it does not kill and could never kill patients. But I don't know what else to call it when they lead someone, blindfolded, right up to the edge of a cliff, and then let him walk off it.
31) The authoritative literature is vague, imprecise, bombastic, and grandiose. Too much of the organization's defining literature, like the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, is written in a euphemistic style where words mean whatever someone wants them to mean:
Uh, Hello? I just signed up for some advice on quitting drinking. Hello? 32) It is all a big bait-and-switch con game. There are so many bait-and-switch stunts pulled in AA that it borders on amazing. Here are just a few examples:
33) It is a secret conspiracy. I am not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't like to find secret conspiracies everywhere, but this is one. It has taken control of our nation's drug and alcohol treatment facilities and institutions, and is using part of the billions of dollars that our government and the health insurance industry spends on drug and alcohol rehabilitation each year to further its own secret agenda, which includes coercing the patients into becoming members of the AA and NA 12-step religion. AA members can easily hide their AA membership, because it's all confidential and anonymous, by definition. Hidden members -- secret agents -- have worked themselves into positions of power where they control the future of our nation's drug and alcohol treatment programs. AA uses its entrenched position to prevent any other treatment modalities from encroaching on what it considers to be its territory, and its money. A secret religion with an ineffective treatment program has no business running our nation's drug and alcohol treatment centers and lying about what it is doing. Personally, I could hardly care less what a bunch of crazy cultists want to believe. It's their lives, and they can do anything they want to with them. I get leafletted and hit on by the Hari Krishnas and the Scientologists every week -- literally -- and it doesn't matter. I don't care if a bunch of feeble-minded alcoholic burn-outs want to cluster together and convince each other that they are God's special children, and The Chosen people. It doesn't matter. But it does matter when a cult uses State and Federal tax money to advance its own religion while pretending to provide therapy for a deadly disease. That is unacceptable. It does matter when a cult uses parole officers, judges, and therapists to force people to join the cult. That is unacceptable. It matters when people who are sick, desperate, confused, and going through a real crisis, are deceived and lied to and fed a crackpot cult religion as the universal cure for all drug and alcohol problems, by people who are supposed to be therapists, but who are really just proselytizing evangelistic alter boys. That is not acceptable. To force the insane practices of a cult religion on people who are supposed to be receiving medical treatment is a crime so monstrous, so evil, so sick, and so bizarre that it is basically unbelievable. That is how groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are getting away with it. People can't believe that it is really happening. The other people, that is -- the people to whom it is not being done.
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