The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems.

The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%.

Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is actually less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery.

Some tests have shown that even receiving no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than receiving A.A. treatment:

One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor George Vaillant of Harvard University, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless -- that it didn't help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested -- a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as "appalling".

While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant's first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.

(Nevertheless, Vaillant is still a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to "get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer." That is cult religion, not a treatment program for alcoholism.)

The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing.

The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door.

The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but those newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is.

Even A.A.'s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), say that:

81% of the newcomers are gone within 30 days,
90% are gone in 3 months, and
95% are gone at the end of a year.

That automatically gives A.A. a failure rate of at least 95%. But the GSO does not count all of those people who only attend a few meetings before quitting -- they don't qualify as "members".

(That amounts to "cherry-picking".) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse.

And also note that the claimed five percent of A.A. newcomers who are still left after one year is exactly the same number as the usual rate of spontaneous remission among alcoholics -- five percent per year.

That is, in any randomly-selected population of alcoholics, approximately five percent per year will finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and they will just quit drinking.

And the Harvard Medical School says that 80% of those successful quitters do it by themselves, alone, without any "treatment program" or any "support group".

If we subtract the normal spontaneous remission rate for alcoholism of five percent per year from A.A.'s claimed success rate of five percent, we get zero for A.A.'s real effective cure rate.

A.A. does not actually make anybody quit drinking; it just takes the credit for the people who were going to quit anyway. A.A. is just taking the credit for peoples' efforts to save their own lives.

And then it gets worse: The attrition continues, and it isn't just because the old-timers all die of old age. Barely one percent of the newcomers to A.A. get a 10-year coin for sobriety, and only 3/4 of one percent get the 11-year coin. Only half of a percent -- 5 out of a thousand -- get the 15-year coin, and only one in a thousand gets the 20-year coin.

The Twelve Steps are actually a hopelessly bad program for recovery:

Cult religion is not a good cure for alcoholism, and A.A. most assuredly is a cult religion.

One of the biggest problems with the Twelve-Step program is the learned helplessness caused by the First Step, where people are taught to confess that they are "powerless over alcohol."

This leads many people to believe that once they have a drink, that a full-blown relapse and total loss of self-control is inevitable and unavoidable.

So some people go on suicidally-intense binges, thinking that it is pointless to try to resist temptation.2 --

Step Two is just as bad: it teaches people that they are insane, and that only a Supernatural Being can restore them to sanity -- which means that they are helpless, and cannot heal themselves.

Then Step Three teaches a lifestyle of infantile narcissism and passive dependency, where A.A. members turn control of their wills and their lives over to "the care of God as we understood Him", and then they expect God to take care of them and run their lives for them, and solve all their problems, and wait on them hand and foot, and do all of the hard work for them from then on...

"Let Go And Let God" is their official motto, their lifestyle, and their approach to problem-solving.

Then Steps Four through Ten induce guilt in the members by forcing members to make lists of all of their sins and flaws, and "defects of character" and "moral shortcomings", and confess every intimate dirty little secret to another A.A. member who isn't even ordained clergy, or even sworn to secrecy.

In Step Eleven you are supposed to "channel" God and receive psychic work orders and power.

Then Step Twelve tells you to go recruiting, to draft more alcoholics into this madness.

There is also experimental evidence that the A.A. teachings about powerlessness lead to binge drinking. In a controlled study of A.A.'s effectiveness, court-mandated offenders who had been sent to A.A. for several months were engaging in five times as much binge drinking as the no-treatment control group which got no A.A. "help".

A.A. boosters and propagandists constantly repeat the Big Lie that A.A. works great, and A.A. with its Twelve Steps is the way that everybody recovers:

One way or another Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or a similar Twelve-Step program is an integral part of almost all successful recoveries from alcohol or drug abuse.

In fact, it is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plan can put a recovering addict on the road to relapse. For some people, regular participation in such a mutual self-help group is all that is needed to become and remain sober.

The Recovery Book, Al J. Mooney M.D., Arlene Eisenberg, and Howard Eisenberg, pages 40-41.

All three of those sentences are untrue. The truth is just the opposite of what they are telling us:

Far more people recover without A.A. than with it.

The good, unbiased, medical research shows that the vast majority of people who successfully recover from alcoholism -- like 80% of them -- actually do it without any Twelve-Step program, or even any "recovery group" or "treatment program" of any kind.

Contrary to everything you have ever been told by 12-Step promoters and recruiters, doing it alone, quitting without any treatment program, or any "support group", or any cult religion, is actually the "time-tested, proven" method that really works for most people.

And the research also shows that A.A. is actually very harmful: it raises the rates of binge drinking, re-arrests, and death.

So it doesn't matter how many people believe that not including A.A. in a treatment program will lead to relapse -- it still isn't true.

And then just going to A.A. meetings does not fix alcoholics. It tends to make them relapse and binge drink, and even die.

CONTINUED: www.orange-papers.org/orange-secrets.html

Part of THE ORANGE PAPERS: One Man's Analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous