Disturbing Tendencies in AA

Two disturbing tendencies are noticeable in contemporary AA. One is toward a lower recovery rate overall. For the first twenty years, the standard AA recovery estimate was seventy-five percent. An experience was that fifty percent of the alcoholics who came to AA got sober right away and stayed sober. Another twenty-five percent had trouble for a while but eventually got sober for good, and the remaining twenty-five percent never made a recovery. Then there was a period of some years when AA headquarters stopped making the seventy-five percent recovery claim in their official literature. In 1968, AA's General Service Organization published a survey indicating an overall recovery rate of about sixty-seven percent. The net of all this seems to be that as AA has gotten bigger and older, its effectiveness has dropped from about three in four to about two in three. (Note: two in three was in 1976 - our data shows numbers much LESS in 1997 - 1 in 15).

The majority of those who become addicted are people with a mystical streak, an appetite for inexhaustible bliss. We sought in bottles what can only be found in spiritual experience. AA worked in the first place because its Twelve Steps were a workable set of guidelines to spiritual experience. Growth of the movement made possible for a time a kind of parasitism in which partial practitioners and non-practitioners of the spiritual principles were able to feed off the strength of those who had undergone real spiritual experiences. But at this point in time, (1976) the parasites have already drained the host organism of a considerable portion of its life force.

Author Unknown, 1976