Yes, and yes. Those are real problems with A.A. and Al-Anon, all right. And even being told that you are weak and sinful and defective and insane and guilty for less than your whole life — just a few years — is harmful too, like happens to newcomers to A.A.

So take care, and have a good life. And have a good day, too.

The author presented no valid evidence that Alcoholics Anonymous really works; he just assumed that it does. Presenting a few stories about Tom, Dick, and Harry quitting drinking while attending the meetings of a cult religion does not prove that the cult religion works as a cure. I know of some Toms, Dicks, and Harrys who quit drinking and doping and instead became Internet fanatics who spend all day in front of a computer screen. Does that prove that the Internet really works as a drug and alcohol cure? And in fact the Internet is the best cure for drug and alcohol problems?

I think not.

The rest of the article is a mess of old A.A. fairy tales, like this:

But later, as he writhed in his hospital bed, still heavily under the influence of belladonna, Wilson decided to give God a try. "If there is a God, let Him show Himself!" he cried out. "I am ready to do anything. Anything!"

What happened next is an essential piece of AA lore: A white light filled Wilson's hospital room, and God revealed himself to the shattered stockbroker. "It seemed to me, in the mind's eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing," he later said. "And then it burst upon me that I was a free man." Wilson would never drink again.

Ordinary sourcerers can allegedly summon up ordinary demons by calling them by name and demanding that they appear:

"In the name of Baelzebub and all of the Forces of Darkness, I command you to appear!"

But the magnificent sourcerer Bill Wilson commanded God Almighty, and God had no choice but to obey and appear....

Oh yeh, right. And if you believe that, I have a major interest in a bridge in Brooklyn that I will sell you cheap. Oh heck, maybe I can even sell you a cult religion and take all of your money.

Need I even bother to mention that fact that belladonna is an even more powerful hallucinogen than LSD? The author of the Wired article seems to have forgotten to mention that little detail. In addition, Bill Wilson later took a lot of LSD, and became very enthusiastic about it. Wilson declared that LSD gave him the same great religious feelings that he had gotten from belladonna in Charlie Towns' Hospital.

To put the frosting on the cake, it seems that Bill Wilson stole the whole story about being on a mountaintop with a wind of spirit blowing through him from his own grandfather. It was Bill's grandfather, who was also an alcoholic named William Wilson, who climbed a mountain one Sunday morning, and begged God for help in quitting drinking, and had a dramatic religious experience of feeling a wind of spirit blowing through him, and never drank again. Read the story here.

The author continued, repeating line after line of untrue A.A. mythology and lore, like:

• The untrue statement that Bill Wilson drew upon the teachings of William James and Carl Jung for the design of Alcoholics Anonymous. That is not true at all. The author wrote:

  In writing the steps, Wilson drew on the Oxford Group's precepts and borrowed heavily from William James' classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Wilson read shortly after his belladonna-fueled revelation at Towns Hospital. He was deeply affected by an observation that James made regarding alcoholism: that the only cure for the affliction is "religiomania." The steps were thus designed to induce an intense commitment, because Wilson wanted his system to be every bit as habit-forming as booze.
  

  That couldn't be much more untrue. The A.A. 12 Steps are based entirely on the occult teachings of Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group cult religion, which the author did mention, but did not give fair credit to.

  Bill Wilson got almost nothing from either William James or Carl Jung. Bill was just dropping names when he wrote in the Big Book that A.A. was based on their teachings.

  The one line that Bill Wilson mistakenly attributed to Carl Jung, actually came from William James:

  '"The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania," is a saying I have heard quoted from some medical man.'
  

  That line came from footnote 1 on page 263 of The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James.

  Bill Wilson got the idea of people getting dramatic religious experiences when they are very sick from James' book. And Bill got the idea of printing a large collection of conversion stories from James' book. A large section of Varieties (pages 198 to 263) is stories about alcoholics getting cured by having a dramatic religious conversion experience, and the back two thirds of the Big Book is similar conversion stories.

  And that's it. That is the total input to A.A. from William James and Carl Jung. All of the rest of Alcoholics Anonymous theology, philosophy, and cult practices came from Frank Buchman's Oxford Group cult religion. Bill Wilson even said so.

  Where did the early AAs find the material for the remaining ten Steps? Where did we learn about moral inventory, amends for harm done, turning our wills and lives over to God? Where did we learn about meditation and prayer and all the rest of it? The spiritual substance of our remaining ten Steps came straight from Dr. Bob's and my own earlier association with the Oxford Groups, as they were then led in America by that Episcopal rector, Dr. Samuel Shoemaker.
  The Language of the Heart, William G. Wilson, page 298, published posthumously in 1988.
  

  "Early AA got it's ideas of self-examination, acknowledgement of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Groups and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and nowhere else."
  Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, page 39.

  Bill Wilson was being a little dishonest there, when he implied that Sam Shoemaker was the leader of the Oxford Group. Frank Buchman was the real leader, and he is the one who copied or made up all of the theology and tenets and practices of the Oxford Group, which Bill rewrote into the Twelve Steps. But Frank Buchman had a very bad reputation for his praise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi sympathizing, so Bill Wilson listed Sam Shoemaker as the leader of the USA branch of the Oxford Group. But the theology and practices are all still pure Buchmanism.

• Bill Wilson was not "a failed stock broker". He was never anything like a stock broker. Bill Wilson was not trained as a broker, or licensed as a broker, and he never worked for a brokerage firm trading stocks for anyone. Bill's claim in the Big Book that he was a stock broker was just another of his self-aggrandizing lies. Bill was actually a stock touter and Wall Street hustler who got involved with stock market swindles. You can read more about Bill's criminal stock market activites here and here.

• After bragging about how many people have been taught Bill Wilson's 12 Steps, the author wrote:

  It's all quite an achievement for a onetime broken-down drunk. And Wilson's success is even more impressive when you consider that AA and its steps have become ubiquitous despite the fact that no one is quite sure how — or, for that matter, how well — they work.

  The only true part of that paragraph is that he does not know how well the 12 Steps actually work. The fact that A.A. has managed to invade the medical field of addiction treatment in a major way does not mean that A.A. works, or is a good thing. That is just an example of the progaganda trick of Appeal to Numbers (Argumentum ad Numerum).

• This is another blatant lie:

  What we do know, however, is that despite all we've learned over the past few decades about psychology, neurology, and human behavior, contemporary medicine has yet to devise anything that works markedly better.
  

  Actually, many, many things work better than A.A. Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the worst ways to treat alcoholism, and it produces one of the highest death rates of any way of treating alcohol abuse.

  Professors Reid K. Hester and William R. Miller (UNM, Albuquerque — Center for Alcohol, Substance Abuse and Addictions, Dept. of Psychology, University of New Mexico), rated treatment modalities by success rate. Here are the results:
  http://www.behaviortherapy.com/whatworks.htm
  

  • Also see:
    http://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/53/1/What-works-A-summary-of-alcohol-treatment-research/Page1.html
    == The same statistics in a different format

  Prof. Miller's biography (on the back of his book Controlling Your Drinking, says:

  Prof. William R. Miller is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of numerous books, including Motivational Interviewing, a modern classic in the field of addiction treatment. Dr. Miller's research, which focuses on providing a broader and more effective range of treatment approaches for people with alcohol and drug problems, has been supported by a 15-year Research Scientist Award from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He is a recipient of the international Jellinek Memorial Award for excellence in alcoholism research.

  I don't have Prof. Hester's biography handy, but I'm sure that it is also impressive.

  The most successful treatment in that chart is "Brief Intervention".
  

  Notice how "Twelve-step facilitation" is so far down the list that you have to look for it. It's number 37 out of 48. Also notice how 12-Step treatment has a negative success rating — the "Cumulative Evidence Score" is a minus 82, while the best treatments are rated positive 390 and 189.

  "Brief Intervention" consists of a real doctor talking to the patient for usually less than one hour, questioning him about all of the ugly details of his drinking and telling him that he will die if he doesn't quit drinking. One time. That's it. No long counseling sessions, no great guidance, no on-going advice, no shoulder to cry on. And no 28-day treatment program. Just one "Dutch Uncle" session and it's over. And that's the most effective thing going.

  That kind of puts the whole expensive "drug-and-alcohol treatment industry" to shame, doesn't it?

  The most damning information about the total failure of A.A. to cure alcoholism came from one of the highest-ranking leaders of A.A., a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous, Dr. Prof. George E. Vaillant, who spent the better part of 20 years shoving A.A. treatment on alcoholics, and trying to prove that A.A. works. His results were that A.A. did not work at all — it actually produced a zero-percent improvement in the alcoholics' sobriety rate, while yielding the highest death rate of any treatment modality that he studied. You can read all about that here.

• This kind of writing is total bull:

  Wilson may have operated on intuition, but somehow he managed to tap into mechanisms that counter the complex psychological and neurological processes through which addiction wreaks havoc. And while AA's ability to accomplish this remarkable feat is not yet understood, modern research into behavior dynamics and neuroscience is beginning to provide some tantalizing clues.
  

  Bill Wilson was not operating on intuition. He just hijacked the alcoholics' branch of Frank Buchman's cult religion, and made them support him in comfort, like any other cult leader. Bill also used A.A. to supply him with a stable of mistresses, too, just like any other cult leader. All of the stories about how well A.A. works were just Bill Wilson's lies to get more people to join his cult and give him more money.

  And of course the current treatment industry is more than happy to declare that their 12-Step quackery really works and is worth the thousands of dollars that they charge for it.

• This is another blatant lie. This author is really rewriting history:

  Headed by a an ex-YMCA missionary named Frank Buchman, who stirred controversy with his lavish lifestyle and attempts to convert Adolf Hitler, the Oxford Group combined religion with pop psychology, stressing that all people can achieve happiness through moral improvement.
  

  Frank Buchman was not just trying to "convert Adolf Hitler". That is another standard A.A. cover-up. The truth is that Frank Buchman was enthusiastically pro-Nazi. Frank Buchman went to the Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies year after year, and saluted Adolf Hitler with a straight-armed Sieg Heil! salute along with the rest of the Nazis. Frank Buchman went to the 1936 Berlin Olympics as the personal guest of the vicious Gestapo leader and S.S. commander Heinrich Himmler, the monster who would soon run the Halocaust that exterminated six million Jews, and Buchman came back raving, "I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler..." You can read all about it here: Partying With The Nazi Party.

  The Oxford Group did not "combine religion with pop psychology". Frank Buchman's theology was particularly odious and medieval. Frank Buchman taught that people were "defeated by sin", and "insane", and only "surrender to God" would save them from certain doom. That really meant that people were supposed to surrender to a strong Führer or "spiritual leader" like him, and let him dictate their lives. Frank Buchman was just another scheming, lying, cult leader who lived in first-class luxury at the expense of others.

• This is also just plain wrong:

  In May 1935, while on an extended business trip to Akron, Ohio, Wilson began attending Oxford Group meetings at the home of a local industrialist. It was through the group that he met a surgeon and closet alcoholic named Robert Smith.
  

  Bill Wilson began attending Oxford Group meetings in November and December of 1934 in New York City, in the company of Ebby Thacher, Rowland Hazard, and Cebra Graves. Bill's mentor in New York was Reverend Samuel Shoemaker Jr., who almost certainly instructed Bill to contact the Oxford Group leader in Akron, Reverend Walter F. Tunks, while he was there on a business trip to Akron, where some Wall Street "operators" were trying to pull off a hostile take-over of a rubber equipment company. The proxy battle and take-over attempt quickly failed, so the operators left town, leaving Bill Wilson behind to try to salvage something from the deal.

  Then, the standard A.A. story is that when Bill had an idle weekend and was afraid that he would drink alcohol, Bill Wilson telephoned Rev. Tunks and begged for another alcoholic to talk to. Rev. Tunks gave Bill a list of ten names and phone numbers to call.

  The last name on the list was a man who referred Bill to Henrietta Sieberling, another Oxford Grouper. When Bill telephoned her, Henrietta thought that Bill might be useful for sobering up Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, who was yet another Oxford Grouper and a sick alcoholic. Henrietta wanted Bill to meet Dr. Bob immediately, but Dr. Bob was already passed out drunk for the day.

  So Henrietta arranged a meeting between Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith the next day. There is no evidence that Bill Wilson ever attended a single Oxford Group meeting in Akron before he met Dr. Bob.

• This is more falsified history:

  In its earliest days, AA existed within the confines of the Oxford Group, offering special meetings for members who wished to end their dependence on alcohol. But Wilson and his followers quickly broke away, in large part because Wilson dreamed of creating a truly mass movement, not one confined to the elites Buchman targeted.
  

  The truth is the Bill Wilson was kicked out of the Oxford Group for refusing to follow orders. Even Bill Wilson said so.

  Dr. Frank Buchman had no problem with building a global "mass movement". His cult spanned the world, from the USA to Great Britain, to most of the European countries, to Africa and Asia and China and India and Australia. Frank Buchman was such a grandiose megalomaniac that he dreamed of taking over the whole world, and he clearly said so. The notion that Bill Wilson had bigger ideas than Frank Buchman is ridiculous.

  No, Bill Wilson was just bad at following orders.

• This is more A.A. fairy-tale stuff:

  Aside from the steps, AA has one other cardinal rule: anonymity. Wilson was adamant that the anonymous component of AA be taken seriously, not because of the social stigma associated with alcoholism, but rather to protect the nascent organization from ridicule. He explained the logic in a letter to a friend:

  [In the past], alcoholics who talked too much on public platforms were likely to become inflated and get drunk again. Our principle of anonymity, so far as the general public is concerned, partly corrects this difficulty by preventing any individual receiving a lot of newspaper or magazine publicity, then collapsing and discrediting AA.
  

  The truth is that Bill Wilson never practiced anonymity. Bill Wilson was a raving narcissistic megalomaniac and publicity hound who made himself into the most famous "anonymous" person in the USA. Anonymity was just for other people, so that they could not become as famous as Bill Wilson.

  This is Bill Wilson's idea of "anonymity":

  "Bill Wilson, converting a fawning moron." Bill Wilson posing for a staged "Man On The Bed" publicity photograph, where Bill allegedly performed miraculous faith healings, making the drunks "pick up their beds and walk." Notice the cross on the wall. This photograph was very carefully staged for best effect.

  Bill's picture was featured in a newspaper article on alcoholism in the August 9, 1942 issue of the Knoxville Journal. Chester E. Kirk Collection of the John Hay Library at Brown University

• This is just more B.S.:

  There's no doubt that when AA works, it can be transformative. But what aspect of the program deserves most of the credit? Is it the act of surrendering to a higher power? The making of amends to people a drinker has wronged? The simple admission that you have a problem? Stunningly, even the most highly regarded AA experts have no idea.
  

  A.A. does not work, remember? A.A. increases the death rate in alcoholics. Cult religion is not a working cure for alcohol abuse.

• Again, this is B.S. that assumes facts not in evidence:

  To begin with, there is evidence that a big part of AA's effectiveness may have nothing to do with the actual steps.
  

  A.A. does not work. A.A. has no effectiveness, and this author never showed any evidence that it does.

• This assumes a cause and effect relationship where none exists:

  The importance of this is reflected by the fact that the more deeply AA members commit to the group, rather than just the program, the better they fare. According to J. Scott Tonigan, a research professor at the University of New Mexico's Center on Alcoholism, Substance Abuse, and Addictions, numerous studies show that AA members who become involved in activities like sponsorship — becoming a mentor to someone just starting out — are more likely to stay sober than those who simply attend meetings.
  

  So, people who become obsessed with a cult religion and let it monopolize their time drink less than people who while away their spare time in bars. What else is new? That does not show that A.A. works. You can say the same thing about Scientology or the Moonies: "People who become obsessed with Scientology, and give it all of their money, drink less than the people who keep their money and spend some of it on beer." That does not make Scientology a good cult.

  I have written about that study of sponsorship before. Look here.

  In a recent controlled study, a group of new Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous members who got sponsors did no better than another group who didn't get sponsors. But strangely enough, the elder members who chose to become sponsors did better than the other members who did not choose to act as sponsors. (The sponsors were a self-selected group; not randomly chosen.) It seems that getting their egos stroked by acting as puffed-up, all-wise, all-knowing sponsors, ordering the wimpy newcomers around, helped some sponsors to stay clean and sober, even though it didn't help the newcomers any.
  

  Note that the same UNM Center on Alcoholism found that A.A. was terrible treatment for alcoholism, one of the worst ways to treat alcoholism. See above. They also found that "spiritual" treatment for alcoholism does not work. Look here.

  J. Scott Tonigan seems to be the odd man out at the UNM Center on Alcoholism. While other people like Prof. William Miller do real research, Tonigan writes this drivel where he says that it appears that people who participate in Alcoholics Anonymous drink less. In other words, he writes about optical illusions. We have corresponded before. Look here. When I challenged him to come up with some facts to back up his assertions, he refused to answer the questions.

• This is more pseudo-scientific B.S.:

  As for the steps themselves, there is evidence that the act of public confession — enshrined in the fifth step — plays an especially crucial role in the recovery process. When AA members stand up and share their emotionally searing tales of lost weekends, ruined relationships, and other liquor-fueled low points, they develop new levels of self-awareness. And that process may help reinvigorate the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is gravely weakened by alcohol abuse.
  

  Actually, that confession process is so degrading and guilt-inducing that it drives some people to relapse and suicide. A.A. raises the death rate in alcoholics, remember?

  Notice the author's use of the propaganda trick of "Sly Suggestions": "that process may help reinvigorate the prefrontal cortex". But then, in the next paragraph, the author suddenly assumes that his crazy junk science suggestion is actually true.

  What is really needed to get the prefrontal cortex healthy again is to stop poisoning it with ethyl alcohol, and take lots of B vitamins, and give it time to heal.

• And this is more of the same fake science B.S.:

  AA, it seems, helps neutralize the power of these sensory cues by whipping the prefrontal cortex back into shape. Publicly revealing one's deepest flaws and hearing others do likewise forces a person to confront the terrible consequences of their alcoholism — something that is very difficult to do all alone.
  

  So now the author claims that A.A. is performing brain surgery, and changing the brains of people who perform the confessional practices? There may actually be some truth to that, but the effect is not good. Frank Buchman's cult recruiting and indoctrination techniques do not "whip the prefrontal cortex back into shape".

  And again, the veiled fascism of Frank Buchman's philosophy is beginning to show. After all of the A.A. tear-jerking pleas for sympathy for those poor alcoholics whom nobody understands, and all of the A.A. denunciation of the outsiders who do not understand those poor alcoholics, and all of the A.A. condemnation of the idea that alcoholics are just morally weak, the A.A. attitude really comes down to "those alcoholics need to get whipped into shape". Get out the whips and leather and call Donna the Dominatrix.

• This is another reversal of reality:

  Finally, the 12 steps address another major risk factor for relapse: stress. Recovering alcoholics are often burdened by memories of the nasty things they did while wasted. When they bump into old acquaintances they mistreated, the guilt can become overwhelming. The resulting stress causes their brains to secrete a hormone that releases corticotropin, which has been shown to cause relapse in alcohol-dependent lab rats.
  

  Actually, it is the stress of A.A. meetings and Fifth Step confession sessions that drive many alcoholics to relapse. A.A. does not work, remember?

• This is more A.A. mythology:

  Bill W., as Wilson is known today, didn't know the first thing about corticotropin-releasing hormone or the prefrontal cortex, of course. His only aim was to harness spirituality in the hopes of giving fellow alcoholics the strength to overcome their disease.
  

  Actually, Bill W. aimed to have A.A. support him in comfort for the rest of his life, and he succeeded. Bill got A.A. to buy him a Cadillac car, and a home in the country, and Bill stole so much money from A.A. that he never had to work again, and the A.A. headquarters office even supported Bill's harem of mistresses for him.

• And now we come to the most important point:

  But how effective is AA? That seemingly simple question has proven maddeningly hard to answer. Ask an addiction researcher a straightforward question about AA's success rate and you'll invariably get a distressingly vague answer.
  

  That statement is not true at all. A.A. does not work. A.A. has a terrible failure rate, and a high death rate, and a zero-percent improvement over normal spontaneous recovery.

  The "addiction researchers" are not vague about the numbers unless they work for a 12-Step treatment center, and don't want to admit that they are selling quack medicine. The honest addiction researchers have produced very clear numbers:

  1. Dr. Jeffrey Brandsma found that A.A. indoctrination greatly increased the rate of binge drinking in alcoholics. People who were sent to A.A. ended up, after 9 months of A.A., doing FIVE TIMES as much binge drinking as another group of alcoholics who got no such help, and NINE TIMES as much binge drinking as another group that got Rational Behavior Therapy.

  2. Dr. Keith Ditman found that A.A. involvement increased the rate of re-arrests for public drunkenness in a group of street drunks.

  3. Dr. Diana Walsh found that "free" A.A. just messed up a lot of alcoholics and make them need more expensive hospitalization later.

  4. Doctors Orford and Edwards conducted the largest and most expensive test of A.A. in England. They found that having a doctor talk to alcoholics and their wives for only one hour, only one time, telling them to quit drinking or they would die, was just as effective as a whole year of A.A.-based treatment.

  5. This one is the most damning evidence of all, because it came from a doctor who loves Alcoholics Anonymous, and is one of its biggest promoters. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous [World] Services, Inc.. Doctor George E. Vaillant (who later became a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University), clearly demonstrated that A.A. treatment kills patients. For eight years, while he tried to prove that A.A. works, his A.A.-based treatment program had a zero-percent success rate above normal spontaneous remission, and worse, it had the highest death rate of any kind of alcoholism treatment that he studied. Dr. Vaillant candidly called the A.A. death rate "appalling". At the end of 8 years, the score with his first 100 A.A.-treated patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.

  Those are not "vague numbers".

• This statement is also untrue:

  A big part of the problem, of course, is AA's strict anonymity policy, which makes it difficult for researchers to track members over months and years. It is also challenging to collect data from chronic substance abusers, a population that's prone to lying. But researchers are most stymied by the fact that AA's efficacy cannot be tested in a randomized experiment, the scientific gold standard.
  

  Wrong. All of the clinical studies listed above tracked their patients, in spite of A.A. "anonymity", and all but Dr. Vaillant's test were true randomized longitudinal studies.

  • Vaillant's test had a synthesized control group but was not randomized.
  • Walsh's test was randomized but did not have a control group — it compared hospitalized versus A.A.-treated alcoholics.
  • The Orford and Edwards study was randomized — a statistical randomization procedure was used to divide the subjects into two groups comparable in the severity of their drinking and their occupational status — but instead of the control group getting no treatment at all, they got just one hour of a doctor giving them advice. That is just one hour of "treatment" in a whole year.
  • The other studies were true randomized longitudinal controlled studies, clinical tests with control groups.

  So A.A. most assuredly can be tested in a randomized experiment, and it has been tested in several randomized experiments, but the A.A. members don't like the results, so they pretend that A.A. cannot be tested properly, and falsely claim that A.A. has not been properly tested. Yes, it has, and A.A. failed the tests.

• Now here the author lets some of the truth slip out:

  AA is still far from ideal. The sad fact remains that the program's failures vastly outnumber its success stories. According to Tonigan, upwards of 70 percent of people who pass through AA will never make it to their one-year anniversary, and relapse is common even among regular attendees.
  

  But that contradicts all of his previous statements about how wonderful A.A. is and how well it works.

  And the truth is that far fewer than 30% get a year of sobriety in A.A. The truth is more like 5%, the same as the success rate of alcoholics who quit drinking all on their own without any "help" or "treatment", or 12-Step indoctrination.

• Now this statement is true, and it is one of the biggest problems with A.A.:

  AA is obviously not about to overhaul its 75-year-old formula.
  

  Right. A.A. is a cult religion, not medicine, and A.A. will not learn from experience and improve its methods. Like any cult religion, they insist that they already know the Magic Answer, and have the truth straight from God, and they are not about to change anything.

  That makes A.A. worthless as a cure for a disease (which they claim alcohol consumption is).

• And the author's closing quote again shows that A.A. is really a cult religion:

  And now, after more than four years in the program? "I know God exists," he says. "I'm so happy I found AA."
  

  Notice that the author did not even mention the question of whether the A.A. member who was speaking was actually sober after four years in A.A.; we are just told that the A.A. member now believes that God exists. Victory is at hand.

So much for the Wired article.

Then you asked, "What's made you so mad at AA?"

Well, for starters, A.A. kills more people than it saves, and then A.A. lies about it. Foisting ineffective quack medicine on sick people, and lying about how well it works, is a really low, vile crime.

Your statement that "I think a lot of people have found relief" does not excuse the deaths that A.A. has caused, or the rapes, or the relapses, or the years of suffering and misery and sickness as people wait for the 12-Step program to start working.

You should read the file The Effectiveness of the Twelve-Step Treatment to see how well A.A. really works.

Then read:

• Rapes and sexual exploitation of under-age girls
• A.A. horror stories

Your statement that "The program is not perfect and there are nuts with in it's membership" is just an attempt at standard alcoholic Minimization and Denial. That's no different than someone saying, "Alcohol may sometimes be a little problem for me... and yes, it caused a few DWI arrests, and I lost my job and my family, but alcohol isn't that big of a deal. No sense making a big fuss about it. I can keep on drinking..."

And you can keep on going to A.A. too, I guess.

The answer to the rest of your question about who am I and what experiences made me feel the way I do are here.

Have a good day now.

Have a good day now.