Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? by Charles Bufe

Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?, Charles Bufe. Tuscon AZ: See Sharp Press, 1997 (revised). 208 pps.


For those who are unfamiliar with See Sharp Press, the company self-describes as a "Publisher of anarchist, atheist, music, and science fiction books." Anyone expecting essays that are unabashedly 'pro-Alcoholics Anonymous' should look elsewhere for reading matter. Those in recovery who are willing to concede that twelve step programs may not be the only way to recover or the best way for all addicts to find recovery should consider reading this book.

A.A. does have some characteristics of a cult. And while A.A. has been successful some of the time, there are some alcoholics who do not recover in a 12 step program. Some atheists who come into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous [and other programs using the 12 steps] do find some sort of higher power. Others do not. A few believers who come into the rooms discover after a time that they no longer believe. 

While the rehab market has almost entirely bought into the "Higher Power" stuff, I suggest that a disservice is being done to two sets of their clients. There are some people who are atheist and/or agnostic in orientation. They have carefully evaluated a variety of religions and religious thought. They are sincere about their non-theism and ought not to be pressured by clinical staff into accepting a brand of spirituality that is not genuine to who they are as human beings. There are others who are marked by their beliefs and their religious practices as belonging to the label 'fundamentalist.' Fundamentalist Christians, the born-againers, and those who accept a literal interpretation of their holy literature-- whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish or other-- will find that the 12-step version of a Higher Power pales in comparison to what they are used to. Additionally, the emphasis by professionals and by folks who bring meetings into the institution on 'keeping an open mind' is something that neither the non-theist nor the fundamentalist will relate to. Are these people to be lost to their addictions?

New Agey 'feel-good' affirmations are not appropriate to offer to an atheist or to a fundamentalist in early recovery. The pop psychology brand of 'treatment' replete with New Age trappings like affirmations, yoga, showing of the film The Secret, lectures on The Course in Miracles or attendance at a Unity service, a strong insistence that 'there are no true coincidences and all of the rest are foreign to both groups. The interesting thing about James Christopher's S.O.S. secular sobriety groups is that both atheists and fundamentalists have found some common ground there. One set of members don't have any sort of gods or higher powers. The other set recognize a very specific God and don't want their religious beliefs or practices to be altered. The S.O.S. meeting in my town is a place where both non-theists and fundamentalists peacefully co-exist.

Addiction is fundamentally a behavioral problem. As such, we do not know enough about competent treatment of people who have it and who are looking for their way out of the mess. Instead, what we have is pretty much the entire recovery industry and 12 step groups who have jumped on the disease concept bandwagon. The practice of the twelve steps has saved many lives from the bondage of addiction. But there are more lives to liberate. 

Ideally, a treatment program ought to grant their clients access to a variety of options: A.A. and all of the other A's [Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Methadone Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Dual Recovery Anonymous, Double Trouble [a separate organization which currently has meetings in NY, NJ and PA], Alanon, Alateen, Alapup, etc...], Women for Sobriety, Smart Recovery, Secular Organizations for Sobriety, Red Road groups [for indigenous Americans], Overcomers Anonymous [specifically for fundamentalist Christians] and others. Non-traditional clients who are returning to hometowns that do not have anything other than the traditional twelve step programs around ought to be taught how to network with others in order to form a group that will help them. They should also be given information on recovery options which are available on-line. 

This cookie-cutter approach to abstinence must stop. If rehabs and drug courts are to offer true intervention, then the individual addict [which includes those who are addicted to the drug alcohol] must be considered in the intervention and in the services being offered. "Individualized treatment plans" which do not take into account that the customer of rehab services is a viable human being with his or her own life and way of being are worthless. Those good members of traditional 12 step groups who scream and yell about the evil inherent in alternative notions of spirituality or even of recovery are partly responsible for a perception that A.A. may in fact be cult-ish or a form of group-think.

This book has research and stats to back up its' conclusions. It offers hope to people who have not found A.A. to be the welcoming fortress that others have found. We are talking about people here. We are talking about people who will continue to die because of our shortsightedness. 

sapphoq reviews says: Kudos to Charles Bufe for the willingness to go against the grain. We need and deserve alternates to 12 step recovery. Although Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? is an older book now, it is worth reading. 

P.S.: Those who want examples of how to individualize the twelve steps can read Charlotte Kasl's most excellent Many Roads, One Journey. Those who are interested in on-line arguments pro- and con- twelve step programs can turn to http://www.green-papers.org/  and to http://www.orange-papers.org/  for starters.

Clean by David Sheff

Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America's Greatest Tragedy, David Sheff.  New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.  e-book 339 pps. with additional notes afterwards.

Some folks may have read David Sheff's book Beautiful Boy about his son's addiction and subsequent recovery.  David Sheff's newest work Clean is a somewhat repetitive overview of treatment for addictions based on the idea that the addict is suffering from a condition which interferes neurologically with proffered help to recover from said condition.  David Sheff correctly points out that addiction is not the only condition [he uses the word "disease," a word which I maintain is not precise enough and does not go far enough in describing addiction] that results in a thick layer of denial.  Other examples are some forms of dementia and traumatic brain injury [dependent upon where the lesions are in the brain itself]; and diabetes.

Sheff builds a case for treating addicts as people who are suffering from a physical condition rather than as people who need to find a god, get right with a god, pray, meditate, or look deep within for the defects which caused them to want to get loaded in the first place.  The problem with those who are caught up in active addiction is that their brains do not allow them the cognition which tells regular folks that they have to change what they are doing.  Sheff advises that cookie cutter grouping of addicts in a rehab doesn't work because of this.  Some addicts may be ready before others are to learn about addiction.

One takeaway from Clean is that the rehabilitation system ought to stop punishing addicts by throwing them out of treatment for doing things that addicts do.  Another is that legal system ought to quit punishing addicts or furnishing consequences for their behaviors which arise from their abnormal neurological states.  A third is that the sooner we quit treating addicts as if they were bad little boys and girls, the better off everyone will be.  I cannot agree with the first and the second points in their entirety, but I do endorse the third.  Every sick patient deserves basic human respect.  Although the etiologies of some particular cancers are demonstrably related to the quantity of fat consumed in a diet, no cancer patient is asked to confess his sins in order to receive amelioration from the cancer.  Nor is she told that she is being therapeutically discharged for puking after [or sometimes before when anticipatory vomiting takes place] a round of chemo.  There's not a whole lot of people screaming at cancer patients that their condition is their fault.  But there is a bunch of people who are sincerely butt-hurt and angry at the antics of both active addicts and addicts in recovery for a variety of reasons.  The Twelve Steps and their quasi-Christian feel in fact may not be optimal or even integral to the [formal, medical, rehabilitative] treatment of addiction.  If the scientific model of addiction is adopted then it follows that rehabs as we now commonly know them will have to change their methods.

A.A. owes its' roots to the Washingtonians-- who thrived contrary to what Bill W. claimed in his writings-- and to the Oxford group.  The first draft of the Big Book, if allowed to be published in its' original form, has a decidedly Christian slant and would have kept out a bunch of non-Christians from remaining in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Indeed, the early A.A. groups excluded women.  Fortunately that changed.  We need more research into how to truly individualize treatment for addicts.  

sapphoq reviews says:  Although Clean was a worthwhile, if wordy, read I had some difficulty with the book.  In spite of the title, Clean deals primarily with alcoholism with the usual passing nod to addiction to other drugs.  I was initially hopeful that Clean would have some things to say about Narcotics Anonymous.  But like many books and treatment programs these days, N.A. is given a pat on the head.  I find this perpetuation of keeping addicts silent to be most distressing.  There are addicts who have barely used or never used alcohol in A.A.  They [usually are somewhat pressured to] identify as alcoholics and say things like, "Everything started and ended with alcohol."  There are also alcoholics who prefer N.A.  But unlike the addicts in A.A., the alcoholic who has never used other drugs is welcomed in the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous.  And the alcoholic almost always identifies as an addict in N.A. willingly, recognizing that the word addict includes addiction to the drug alcohol.
     Sheff does a fairly good job of describing adjuncts to recovery in the form of opiate substitutes, i.e. methadone and other medications.  He also points out the extra liability that a mental health diagnosis can be to the addict seeking recovery.  But he does not clearly offer his vision of what a treatment program using best practices might look like.  This is something that I would have been interested in hearing more about.  Not all rehabs, in-patients, out-patients, detoxes, halfway houses, and three quarter way houses are equal in their effectiveness.  Add to that the manipulation and belittling of addicts in early recovery that occurs by staff people who should know better [and by some folks with longer periods of recovery who have forgotten what they were like in early recovery], it is truly a jungle out there.
     Within the limitations that I have described, Clean is a worthwhile read for those who do not work in the addictions field and for some folks with some time away from active addiction.  Those who work in the addictions field will probably find nothing new [even if they are not implementing some of the suggestions].  And the general audience will probably be lost in the midst of all of the words.  Recommended with some hesitation.  

A.A.? No Way! by Charles Delaney

A.A.? No Way!, Charles Delaney.  Self-published, Smashwords, 2012.  ebook, 59 pps.


Some people find help in traditional [12 step] groups and traditional [based upon the 12 steps] treatment programs and rehabs.  Others don't.  Charles Delaney had been to A.A. and he found the program to be significantly lacking.  The A.A. members themselves appeared to be clones of each other.  Worse, they were not ready to hear Delaney's criticism of the program itself nor what he found in looking for alternatives.

The problem as Charles Delaney sees it is that A.A. has a 95% failure rate.  He states that Rational Recovery has a higher success rate of its members achieving abstinence than A.A. does.  He also states that folks who attempt to quit their addictions by themselves have a better chance of doing so than folks in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and other Anonymous derivatives.  Delaney does quote from some studies but does not provide any footnotes for his stats.  On page 11, he says "The basic idea of those programs are the best of ideas...put to the worst of applications."  He maintains that Alcoholics Anonymous is in fact a Christian and a religious program.  He criticizes the idea that alcoholics are powerless when it comes to alcohol.  He advocates for the assuming of personal responsibility in addressing one's addiction.

A.A.? No Way! offers criticism of the twelve steps from a pagan perspective.  There is an outline of "A 9-Step Recovery for Asatru/Odinists" [which begins on page 40 in my ebook] that I personally thought were excellent.  After that, the book begins to fall apart.  Delaney endorses an old book  written by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz and published in 1960 called Psycho-Cybernetics.  [Psycho-Cybernetics espoused positive thinking, if you can dream it you can do it, and mind-body connection woo-woo].  He then detours into a very rudimentary understanding of brain function and creativity.  A.A.? No Way! finishes up with the idea that there is so much more out there in a life of abstinence than can be found in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.

sapphoq reviews says:  Some of A.A.? No Way! rang true to me and some didn't.  To his credit, Charles Delaney was quick to point out that those who have found their help in A.A. ought to remain in A.A.  Although A.A.? No Way! lacks in footnotes and a bit of execution, it is especially valuable for those heathens who want to try some steps written specifically for them.  Quite frankly, except for the woo-woo noted within the book he recommended, I liked this little ebook.  Charles Delaney has the barebones for a longer book within the first 43 pages of A.A.? No Way! .  It is my sincere hope that he will undertake a longer book project related to alternatives to 12 step recovery, complete with footnotes but lacking the feel-good woo-woo and pop psychology that often passes for professional treatment these days.  Recommended for heathens who have failed in A.A. because of its' somewhat quasi-christian approach to recovery.