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“Any serious treatment center would study its own outcomes to modify and improve its approach. But rehabs generally don’t do this. For example, only one of the three best-known facilities has ever published outcome studies (Hazelden); neither Betty Ford nor Sierra Tucson has checked to see if their treatment is producing any results for at least the past decade. Hazelden’s follow-up studies looked at just the first year following discharge and showed disappointing results, as we will see later. Efforts by journalists to solicit data from rehabs have also been met with resistance, making an independent audit of their results almost impossible and leading to the inevitable conclusion that the rest of the programs either don't study their own outcomes or refuse to publish what they find.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“[The inebriate hospitals]’ philosophy, not so different from today’s rehabilitation facilities, was that people could detoxify, heal, and eventually flourish if they were deprived of any alcohol for a period of time, often up to one year. But the inebriate hospitals were somewhat different from today’s palatial rehabs in one important way: patients were often subjected to cold showers and typically housed alongside society’s cast-offs—the blind, those suffering from syphilis, the mentally ill, orphans, even prisoners.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“The inebriate hospitals also adopted another new procedure for alcoholism: prefrontal lobotomy. This, painfully, failed to cure the “disease” of alcoholism, with one account famously relating that, “[f]ollowing the procedure, the patient dressed and, pulling a hat down over his bandaged head, slipped out of the hospital in search of a drink.”

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“At the threshold of AA’s invention, America carried a population of alcoholics deeply fatigued by many decades of barbaric treatment, imprisonment, and isolation; rattled by errant snake oil “cures”; and suffused with a widespread sense of hopelessness. Bill Wilson was just such an alcoholic.”

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“As his biographer put it, “[Bill Wilson] was compulsive, given to emotional extremes. . . . Even after he stopped drinking, he was still a heavy consumer of cigarettes and coffee. He had a sweet tooth, a large appetite for sex, and a major enthusiasm for LSD and, later, for niacin, a B-complex vitamin.” Indeed, he was such a heavy smoker that the effects of tobacco would rob him of his mobility and, eventually, his life. One account recalls that he continued to smoke even in his old age when he needed frequent doses of oxygen just to make it through the day. Friends who arrived at the house reported seeing him struggling to decide whether he should take oxygen or smoke another cigarette. The cigarette won every time. A similar pattern arose around a different behavior: serial adultery. Wilson’s need to sleep with women outside his marriage was legendary—so much so that AA members eventually put together a “Founder’s Watch” committee designed to steer him away from any tempting young women at the numerous events he attended.”

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“It is essentially impossible to separate Wilson’s passion for the spiritual from his founding of AA, despite the organization’s frequent protestations that it is nonreligious in nature. Of course, Alcoholics Anonymous members have every possible view about religion. But the organization is clearly permeated with Wilson’s religious beliefs.”

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“[Bill] Wilson himself said twenty years following his conversion that he “wanted every alcoholic to be able to say, as he could, that their belief in God was ‘no longer a question of faith’ but ‘the certainty of knowledge [gained] through evidence.”

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“One day while lying prone and feeling despair during his fourth admission to Towns Hospital, [Bill] Wilson is reported to have cried out, “I’ll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!” He described seeing a bright light, feeling euphoric, then a great calm. Armed with the certitude and wonder that this moment produced in him, Wilson never drank again.”

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“[Bill Wilson] rarely mentioned in retelling this story that he was being treated at the time by the “Belladonna Cure,” a chemical cocktail that included the known hallucinogens atropine and scopolamine. Perhaps more importantly, we should notice this story’s startling similarity to his grandfather’s. Just like the older man, Wilson claimed that he’d been transported to a mountaintop, where he experienced a nearly word-for-word reenactment of the same sensations—“uplift” and “spirit”—that his grandfather spoke about more or less continuously during Wilson’s childhood. Despite these clues that more prosaic forces may have been at work, Wilson believed for the rest of his life that he had been touched by God, and he was absolutely certain that divine experience had forever liberated him from the urge to drink.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“[Bill] Wilson wrote: “The early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Group and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else.” Although Wilson felt indebted to the Oxford Group for many things, he would eventually break from the organization.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“Alcoholics Anonymous was proclaimed the correct treatment for alcoholism over seventy-five years ago despite the absence of any scientific evidence of the approach’s efficacy, and we have been on the wrong path ever since. Today, almost every treatment center, physician, and court system in the country uses this model. Yet it has one of the worst success rates in all of medicine: between 5 and 10 percent, hardly better than no treatment at all. Most of the expensive, famous rehab centers that base their treatment on the Twelve Steps likewise have offered no evidence for their effectiveness. Most of them don’t even study their own outcomes.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“In the seventy-six years since AA was created, 12-step programs have expanded to include over three hundred different organizations, focusing on such diverse issues as smoking, shoplifting, social phobia, debt, recovery from incest, even vulgarity. All told, more than five million people recite the Serenity Prayer at meetings across the United States every year.”

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“Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“Peer-reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is, about one of every fifteen people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“In 2006, one of the most prestigious scientific research organizations in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, conducted a review of the many studies conducted between 1966 and 2005 and reached a stunning conclusion: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA” in treating alcoholism.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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