“Firstly, Alcoholics Anonymous is wrong,” Murdoch and Lilian say. “Alcoholism is not a progressive, incurable disease or illness which alcoholics are born with. It is a behaviour problem, a response to dysfunctional childhood.

“Sometimes I feel like the only free person in America.” So says leading addiction expert Dr. Stanton Peele in the latest blog entry shortly to be posted on his authoritative and widely consulted addiction website.

Alcoholism is not a disease with an invasive pathology, nor is it a disease of genetics gone awry. Alcoholism has nothing to do with irresistible impulses or uncontrollable urges. Alcoholism is a disease of volition.

It is time we made a thorough investigation of Alcoholics Anonymous in the interest of our public health. A.A. is identified in the public mind as a God-fearing fellowship of 350,000 "arrested alcoholics" who keep one another sober and rescue others from the horrors of alcoholism. Unfortunately, A.A. has become a dogmatic cult...

The couple were chronic alcoholics - decades of hard drinking had left their lives in a mess, and they were penniless and living rough on the streets. To look at them today, however, sitting in their comfortable home sipping a glass of wine, you'd never believe that they'd almost drunk themselves to death.

“We are not against anybody going to AA if that’s what they want,” says Lilian. “But we say that lifelong sobriety is not recovery from alcoholism, as AA prescribes. That is only treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause, and as such is merely a damage-limitation exercise.”

Pursuing lifelong sobriety is not a sign of recovery from alcoholism, as Alcoholics Anonymous claims. Staying away from booze one day at a time is treating the symptom instead of the fundamental underlying problem, and merely a damage limitation exercise.

Homeless alcoholics Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald almost drank themselves to death. But after dragging each other down, they pulled each other up again. The pair became interested in psychology and started to analyse what had led them to start drinking to excess. They came to the conclusion their problems lay in their upbringings.

The recovery process for the couple entailed reading up on psychology and piecing together their shattered selves. At the end of it, they decided that years of AA meetings had prevented them moving on rather than helped their recovery.

When you see an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting portrayed in a film or on television, the hero or heroine stands up and says: “My name’s Bill and I’m an alcoholic.” Then it fades out to lush music and you don’t know what happens next. Well, we attended AA meetings on and off for 20 or so years. We are convinced that what happens after the music fades away does not help everybody.