“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“[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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“[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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Going to rehab” is likewise a common refrain in music and film, where it is almost always uncritically presented as the one true hope for beating addiction.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.”
Source: Richard II
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry