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“There is nothing inherently wrong with apologizing to those who have been harmed, directly or indirectly, by the consequences of addiction. The problem is the echo once more of the fundamentalist religious principle: that the path to recovery is to cleanse oneself of sin.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“He also found himself increasingly resentful of the “tally system” that AA uses to measure sobriety: every time he “slipped” and had a drink, he “went back to zero.” All the chips he’d earned—the tokens given by AA for milestone periods of sobriety—became meaningless. This system compounded his sense of shame and anger, leading him to wonder why he lacked the willpower or fortitude to master the incredible force of his 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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“He found a few “old-timers” who believed wholly in the program and who encouraged him to dismiss the great majority of people who fell through the cracks. They just weren’t ready to stop, he was reassured.”

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Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“When Dominic entered my office, he had accepted as empirical truth that he was a deeply flawed individual: amoral, narcissistic, and unable to turn himself over to a Higher Power. How else to explain the swath of destruction he had cut through his own life and the lives of those who loved him? His time in AA had also taught him that his deeper psychological life was immaterial to mastering his addiction. He had a disease; the solution was in the Twelve Steps. When he was ready to quit, he would. It took eight months of psychotherapy before Dominic stopped drinking for good. Although he remained in therapy for several years after that, the key that unlocked his addiction was nothing more complex or ethereal than an understanding of what his addiction really was and how it really worked.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“Rehab owns a special place in the American imagination. Our nation invented the “Cadillac” rehab, manifested in such widely celebrated brand names as Hazelden, Sierra Tucson, and the Betty Ford Center. Ask the average American about any of these institutions and you will likely hear a response tinged with reverence—these are the standard-bearers, our front line against addiction. The fact that they are all extraordinarily expensive is almost beside the point: these rehabs are fighting the good fight, and they deserve every penny we’ve got. Unfortunately, nearly all these programs use an adaptation of the same AA approach that has been shown repeatedly to be highly ineffective.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“Many top rehab programs include extra features such as horseback riding, Reiki massage, and “adventure therapy” to help their clients exorcise the demons of addiction. Some renowned programs even have “equine therapists” available to treat addiction—a fairly novel credential in this context, to put it kindly. Sadly, there is no evidence that these additional “treatments” serve any purpose other than to provide momentary comfort to their clientele—and cover for the programs' astronomical fees, which can exceed $90,000 a month.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“Why do we tolerate this industry? One reason may sound familiar: in rehab, one feels that one is doing something, taking on a life-changing intervention whose exorbitant expense ironically reinforces the impression that epochal changes must be just around the corner. It is marketed as the sort of cleansing experience that can herald the dawn of a new era. How many of us have not indulged this fantasy at one time or another—the daydream that if we could just put our lives “on pause” for a while and retreat somewhere pastoral and lovely, we could finally make sense of all our problems? Alas, the effect is temporary at best. Many patients begin using again soon after they emerge from rehab, often suffering repeated relapses. The discouragement that follows these failures can magnify the desperation that originally brought them to help’s door. What’s especially shocking is how the rehab industry responds to these individuals: they simply repeat their failed treatments, sometimes dozens of times. Repeat stays in rehab are very common, and readmission is almost always granted without any special consideration or review. On second and subsequent stays, the same program is offered, including lectures previously attended.”

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

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
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.”

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

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

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

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

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
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.”

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

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
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.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
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.”

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