Alcoholics Anonymous
Science
Column
Medicine
usually claims to cure only about 2 per cent of the cases of acute alcoholism
it treats. Last week a non-medical group appeared which made the unusual
claim that 25 per cent of its cases were cured. Called Alcoholics Anonymous,
the group was a club composed of ex-drunkards and men trying to overcome
the liquor habit who, for obvious reasons, prefer their names to remain
unknown. Not particularly anxious for publicity, it nevertheless came
into the limelight last Thursday evening when John D. Rockefeller Jr.
gave a dinner party for educators and others interested in the club’s
work.
The
organization has existed for more than four years; yet it has spread
its gospel only by word-of-mouth advertising and a free book. It
started
with two members; today it has some- thing around 500. It has no dues,
but it does have a strict membership requirement: an honest desire to
stop drinking.
The
founder was a commercial traveler who found himself obsessed with liquor
and was unable to get cured at any of the sanitariums he tried. Finally,
though he was an agnostic, he turned to what for want of a better name
might be called faith. Immediately he got help in the form of his own
determination to stop drinking; almost as soon, he was impelled to help
another drinker cure himself in the same manner.
From
these two men sprang the society and its three principles of (1) telling
another person--a friend, a member of the group, perhaps even a priest,
in the case of a Roman Catholic--of the trouble that has turned him
to drink, (2) resolving to abstain henceforth; (3) helping others to
abstain. In short, members subordinate a desire for liquor for something
higher--call it God, Buddha, faith, self-determination, or what you
will.
Today
the society has branches in Akron, Cleveland, Chicago, and the New York
metropolitan area. It meets in small groups at various members’
houses and keeps the address of its headquarters as secret as its -members’
names--giving out only two post-office box numbers in New York, one
for general inquiries and the other for requests for its book. Through
the generosity of men who have conquered alcoholism and of onlookers
like Rockefeller, who does not drink but is interested in movements
to eradicate drunkenness, it raises a budget for salaries of its directors
and stenographers, rent, and stationery.
(Source:
Newsweek, February 19, 1940)
