Has AA misdirected alcoholics for 90 years?

The history of alcoholism is colored by the fact it has spent almost the entire 20th century trying to be recognized as a disease. In Joe Miller’s brief but more than sufficient history of Alcoholics Anonymous, US of AA, doctors play almost no positive role until the 2000s. Ordinary Americans, suffering the effects, tried to figure out the extent, the how, and the why of alcoholism. They had their successes and plenty of setbacks, and by the 1960s were at the level of the Supreme Court, arguing it was a disease, not a crime.

Alcoholism was finally declared a disease in the late 1960s, not by doctors or the AMA, but by President Lyndon Johnson, who by then had been part of the organization for 20 years. Funding in the millions began to flow from federal coffers to agencies and commissions led by AA supporters. The focus was almost entirely on total abstinence as the only treatment. But as the rest of the world knew, that’s not true, not what it looks like, and not how it works.

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is one of the strongest brands in US history. Everyone knows it means constant meetings of verbal self-flagellation and obeisance to God, to ward off the temptation to drink. That members monitor each other with the sole intent of preventing the consumption of a single drop of alcohol by other members. Doctors all but automatically send patients…