Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Lance Dodes

Quote by Lance Dodes

Work

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

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Lance Dodes

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Lance Dodes. more

You May Also Like

“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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image

“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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image

“[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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image

“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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image

“[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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image

“[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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image

“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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyAddiction And RecoveryGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image

“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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyAddiction And RecoveryGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image

“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.”

Time
Book:Richard II
Create image