Why I Dislike AA

In the spring of 2008, we medical students (in pairs) had to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting as per one of our course's course requirements. Not a big deal, not making a big deal out of it. What was a big deal to me was how appalling AA was and how nobody else seemed to think so.

Thank God I can fast-forward by less than a year to today and can thank Penn and Teller for this video. Are they jackasses? Of course. Are they fire-breathing atheists? Truly. They have no respect for religious beliefs whatsoever and make no point of hiding that fact. In spite of this, I feel confident that this video will politely express to my religious, agnostic, and atheists friends alike precisely why I find Alcoholics Anonymous (and similar programs) to be absolutely unacceptable:

Penn & Teller's BULLSHIT - Alcoholics Anonymous - Part 1 of 3
Penn & Teller's BULLSHIT - Alcoholics Anonymous - Part 2 of 3
Penn & Teller's BULLSHIT - Alcoholics Anonymous - Part 3 of 3

For those of you who don't have 30 minutes to spare or who don't find Penn & Teller to be tolerable, much less entertaining, I'll sum it up for you below. My complaints are listed in order from most heinous or aggravating to least:

1. AA tells the alcoholic that he is powerless to change his life on his own. This is the antithesis of what professional psychiatrists tell patients with addictions.
   
2. Many courts (including those in Tippecanoe County) order convicted criminals to go to AA meetings or else face serious penalties such as imprisonment. This is a violation of the U.S. Constitution because of #4 below.
   
3. Many insurers and private businesses order their employees / clients to go to AA meetings or else face expulsion. This is religious screening which, depending on your worldview, either ought to be illegal or ought to be legally permissible but is still a base thing to do to somebody. At least people do have the civil right to pick their employers and insurers, unlike their inability to pick their judges. See #4 below.
   
4. AA tells the alcoholic that he needs to submit to the Christian God. This is what makes #2 and #3 so bad: because AA is essentially indoctrination into the Christian faith.
   
5. AA makes a mockery of the Christian faith by not providing legitimate spiritual guidance from an ordained priest or minister. It makes a further mockery of the Christian faith by coercing people into accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior (lest they be fired, go to prison, etc.) than allowing them to freely discover Christ.
   
6. AA is not a professional organization. By this, I mean that they are not taxable by the government, nor are they held accountable by federal bureaus for providing public records. AA has not provided, nor is it currently willing to provide, raw statistics which reflect what percentage of AA members were successful in overcoming their addiction (where "success" could be legally defined one way or another). In fact, AA holds as a central tenet that an individual is "once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic" and requires members at meetings to introduce themselves as alcoholics even when they have gone without sipping an alcoholic beverage for over 40 years (as I learned at the meeting I sat in on for class last spring).
   
7. An internal report conducted in 1989 (and obtained somehow by the P&T B.S. staff) suggests that only 5% of members who attend Alcoholics Anonymous will still be clean after 12 months. In fact, the graph shows a classical exponential curve, reflecting that after only 3 months there are only 10% of people who are still attending AA and can honestly claim to be dry. This may be propaganda, I don't know, but Penn & Teller go on to say that the success rate of quitting alcohol all by one's self (with no program to assist you) is also around 5% by the 12-month marker, suggesting that AA cannot possibly justify their existence -- or your tax dollars! (As a non-profit organization, their payroll income has to come from somewhere, folks!)

Sorry if I've offended anybody. Sorry if anybody here has either been a recovering alcoholic (if you have been, I don't know; I don't know that any of my friends are or ever were alcoholics), and sorry if by extension your parent, sibling, or spouse has been a recovering alcoholic at one point in his or her life. Allow me just to say this: I believe that AA is a poor means to the ends of non-alcoholism because I believe that AA itself (as an organization) does not see non-alcoholism as its ends. I believe that it very specifically sees Christian revivalism as its ends and that it insidiously operates within the (illegal!) protection of the judiciary in this country to make born-agains out of men and women with nothing left to lose, i.e. it exploits men and women who are already victims in suffering. To me, that is unconscionable, even if I am aware of the people whose lives have been saved from alcohol poisoning, cirrhosis, or liver cancer by AA and programs like it.

Thanks and credit to Misters Penn Jilette and Teller for their unscientific, highly-biased, and yet humorous and well-spoken exposé of the problems with Alcoholics Anonymous.