History of Addiction - History of Alcoholism

Bill Wilson was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), a fellowship of support groups dedicated to helping alcoholics achieve sobriety. In December 1934, Bill Wilson’s experienced a spiritual awakening and conscious contact with God that was a pivotal event in the founding of A.A. and the Twelve Step program of recovery. By deconstructing Bill Wilson’s own words within the context of physicalism, we posit that the mechanisms of his spiritual awakening and conscious contact with God, were not a transcendental or supernatural experience but the result of a confluence of physical factors that created a Neurobiological Perfect Storm.

If the field embraces the larger spectrum of people with AOD (and other) problems within its purview (which it has), then it must significantly expand its potential treatment goals and intervention technologies (which it has not).

First, most members of Alcoholics Anonymous do speak of their alcoholism in terms of disease: the vocabulary of disease was from the beginning and still remains for most of them the best available for understanding and explaining their own experience. But the use of that vocabulary no more implies deep commitment to the tenet that alcoholism is a disease in some technical medical sense than speaking of sunrise or sunset implies disbelief in a Copernican solar system.

Are alcoholism and other addictions diseases? If so, what manner of diseases are they, and how can they best be treated? If not, then how can we understand and respond to such conditions?

Historically disempowered persons, and, in particular, communities of color, have been illserved by acute, biomedical models of intervention into alcohol and other drug problems.