The Truth About AA. AA's Massive Failure | The Millions Story They Won't Tell.
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Recently, I saw a YouTube video from one of my allies against the failed organization of Alcoholics Anonymous. Quackaholics Anonymous titled his episode, AA And Moving Goalposts. It speaks of AA members’ redirection of prior claims of success once they are confronted. One of the common claims that Victor, the creator, notes is the initial stance of an AA member, when confronted for their failure rates, that AA has helped millions of people. This response is common as I am beginning to get this rebuttal as well on my blog and YouTube channel from those pundits of the rooms. How dare all of us critique a program that has helped millions?
The video from Victor ignited a spark that gave investigation of this claim of millions being helped by the AA program. On the surface this claim sounds as if the AA method is wildly successful. But you have to dig deeper into the total number of members that have been in the rooms since Bill Wilson founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. Because the fact is that AA has not only not been successful but a huge failure if you look at this claim of success comparably.
It took the program until 1950 to even have approximately 100,000 active members. In 1960, the number had grown to about 162,000. In 1975, the numbers vary, depending who you read but rates somewhere conclusively between a half million to a million members. So if we assume the million membership at best, it took the program forty years to gain this one million. By 1980, we are looking at active AA members at 1.4-1.5 million. By 1990, they were close to two million and today over two million.
So let’s take that thirty-five years between 1990 and 2025. We will round off approximately two million members of Alcoholics Anonymous worldwide. It is read that 22% of individuals stay in AA long term. We’ll consider those who return as new cases. Factor that in to the two million members a year and we are looking at a rough estimate of over fifty to fifty-five million souls who went to AA over that thirty-five year time span for help with alcoholism. What AA proponents fail to see, because cult members will never see facts in front of them, is that nowhere near, not even remotely close to fifty-some million people were helped by the methods of AA and the Twelve Steps. Depending on who you read, you will find that outside of one flawed study from Stanford, the failure rate to stay sober long term in Alcoholics Anonymous is anywhere between 80-90%.
That means Alcoholics Anonymous failed forty-four million people in the course of thirty-five years. It is difficult for even the experts to quantify the data of who stayed and how long people stayed in AA, but even with this makeshift estimate, the point is that for every million that AA helped in that thirty-five years, more than three million weren’t helped at all and that number is very gracious at best.
So technically one could say AA helped millions of people only because of how long the program has been around. This remains a very small percentage of the whole, which makes this claim absolute nonsense. If a parachute was malfunctioning 80-90% of the time and killed forty-four million people who jumped out of that plane, but six to ten million or so survived, would you call that parachute making company competent? Would you claim that they have a successful product? Given enough time, and AA has had almost a hundred years, eventually even with a low probability of success, the successful ones will reach millions. But the fact remains that the program completely fails tens of millions.
So what AA proponents do is give half a story to back up their claim, which is common with cult-like mentality. It is much like a Christian fundamentalist showing that carbon dating is invalid because a live mollusk is dated fifty thousand years old using that technique but not revealing the carbonates in the hard water the mollusk was extracted from throw the test off, in which scientists are very much aware. AA pundits are doing the exact same thing. They are showing a number that appears to give a success rate when the other number that is the failure rate, they won’t mention at all.
This sort of nonsensical reasoning is exactly why some of us content creators are going after them. Imagine that you are an alcoholic, which all of us anti AA content creators were, and initially being presented that millions were saved with AA and not telling us that tens of millions fail? That Judas leads us unknowingly to the slaughterhouse that cuts the head off of future sobriety. Again, would you jump out of that plane knowing your parachute opens twenty percent of the time? The only reason AA can claim the millions saved rebuttal is the sheer numbers accumulated over time. But any researcher worth his salt would never place stock in a percentage that fails eighty to ninety percent of the time. That is why that rebuttal is so ridiculous, no different than the rebuttals that come from Young Earth Creationists.
Quackaholics Anonymous also brought up a very good point when they are confronted with this fact of their failed program. They move the goalposts, he states. This is also true. I’ve been back and forth with their rebuttals. First, they state millions are saved as if this is the vast majority when it is the vast minority. Then they will backtrack and say that different methods help different people so who are we to judge? They will finally rest on the go-to of: Well, AA saved my life, that’s all I can say.
First, we can’t say that it was AA that saved his life or those in the minority that even are in the millions over that long, long period of time. AA was the only game in town when Wilson created it. And it initially had the same dismal success rate it does today. But no one thought to change it or create another program. Remember, it was taboo then for men to admit they had a problem with alcohol. It was a sign of weakness, and maybe it is. But no one is strong all the time in every aspect of their life. And women’s alcoholism wasn’t even acknowledged. It’s not like there was this societal jump to get in there, find out what works and solve the problem of alcoholism for the majority who fell into its abyss. AA just continued on racking up those numbers of failures and a much smaller group of successes that appeared to gain significance only because it was never compared to the failure rate.
Today, in the last few decades, other methods are beginning to gain a foothold. There is Sinclair Method. There is SMART Recovery. The rah rah team of the rooms will state we don’t have numbers long term for these programs. And that is true. But Sinclair Method is using evidence based analysis and has at least moderate term good outcomes to date to maintain sobriety and in decades to come may have positive long term results as well. SMART Recovery is adamant in individualized programs that work for those using them. If these programs end up with even a fifty percent success rate, then they will have far outperformed anything AA gave us in their almost hundred years of existence.
The difference is these newer programs aren’t claiming to be the end all be all method to gain sobriety in the long term. AA does claim this. This will be denied as AA members continue to backpedal when they are confronted. They would like to present as very kind souls who won’t condemn someone who questions AA method. Anyone who has been in the rooms knows this isn’t true. It was very evident to myself as I entered the AA door at eleven months sober. I went to two meetings and left because it was that obvious to someone who was reinventing his life on all planes how toxic those circles are. My critics will balk at my whole two meetings. Feel free to watch a Quackaholics Anonymous video or one from Sobriety Bestie, who interviews many ex AA members, all of whom were in the rooms for years. They say the same thing I do.
For those millions who were saved by AA? There is no evidence it was AA who saved them. I state this in my own content that the primary reason, the number one factor in staying sober is the person has to choose to not touch alcohol again. It does not matter whether the person decides to drink again while in AA or other programs. As stated in my book on the matter, either you will develop the willpower to abstain from alcohol or you will return to alcoholism. That’s it and that’s all. The person who chose to stay away from alcohol in AA would have done so in SMART Recovery as well. So AA can’t even take credit for these millions it saved. AA didn’t save them. They saved themselves while they happened to be in AA.
But here is the difference between Alcoholics Anonymous and the other programs besides other programs determined to find what works and AA being fixated on what doesn’t for most of the members who enter its doors. The other programs aren’t a cult. They aren’t based on a spiritual awakening from Bill Wilson who established a program founded on divine intervention, which The Big Book flat out states and states repeatedly it was. They don’t rely on the Magic Elf intervening on your alcoholism premised on a disease that can never be solved. They rely on techniques and are observing which techniques seem to have the best outcomes.
These other programs also don’t destroy the self-esteem of the members. They don’t state you are forever an addict or diseased. They state you got addicted to alcohol and are working to take the effects of addiction away and develop a program to restore Self. They don’t continually damage the individual emotionally by keeping them in the world of addiction and constant regurgitation of the alcoholic past.
This is a point I will add to Victor’s analysis of moving goalposts. Those “saved” millions that have accumulated over the years? They may not be drinking, but Alcoholics Anonymous has damaged them greatly. Marriages end because of AA. The person lives in paranoia about not knowing if he will be sober tomorrow, only today. The master status is always a recovering alcoholic under the watch of AA. None of this is healthy for the individuals in the rooms.
So as we all keep saying, AA fails most. And the ones who stay sober, AA fails as well. For one who has had his life stolen from him by a cult is not a success—whether he drinks again or not.
And to reinvent all of your planes to progress forward check out:
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For the condensed and orderly version of how I beat the addiction of alcoholism check out: THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK
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To journey on a tale of epic transformation on a 2,660 mile trail check out: THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL
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John Barleycorn: taken from Jack London's memoir of his alcoholism. John Barleycorn: First published, 1913
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