Aa history Lovers 2010 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page

2010

*
The church will be closed tomorrow, and the drunks are freaking out. An

elderly lady in a prim white blouse has just delivered the bad news, with

deep apologies: A major blizzard is scheduled to wallop Manhattan tonight,

and up to a foot of snow will cover the ground by dawn. The church, located

on the Upper West Side, can't ask its staff to risk a dangerous commute.

Unfortunately, that means it must cancel the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting

held daily in the basement.
A worried murmur ripples through the room. "Wha. what are we supposed to

do?" asks a woman in her mid-twenties with smudged black eyeliner. She's in

rough shape, having emerged from a multiday alcohol-and-cocaine bender that

morning. "The snow, it's going to close everything," she says, her

cigarette-addled voice tinged with panic. "Everything!" She's on the verge

of tears.

A mustachioed man in skintight jeans stands and reads off the number for a

hotline that provides up-to-the-minute meeting schedules. He assures his

fellow alcoholics that some groups will still convene tomorrow despite the

weather. Anyone who needs an AA fix will be able to get one, though it may

require an icy trek across the city.
That won't be a problem for a thickset man in a baggy beige sweat suit.

"Doesn't matter how much snow we get-a foot, 10 feet piled up in front of

the door," he says. "I will leave my apartment tomorrow and go find a

meeting."

He clasps his hands together and draws them to his heart: "You understand

me? I need this." Daily meetings, the man says, are all that prevent him

from winding up dead in the gutter, shoes gone because he sold them for

booze or crack. And he hasn't had a drink in more than a decade.

The resolve is striking, though not entirely surprising. AA has been

inspiring this sort of ardent devotion for 75 years

. It was in June 1935, amid

the gloom of the Great Depression, that a failed stockbroker and reformed

lush named Bill Wilson founded the

organization after meeting God in a hospital room. He codified his method in

the 12 steps, the rules at the heart of AA. Entirely lacking in medical

training, Wilson created the steps by cribbing ideas from religion and

philosophy, then massaging them into a pithy list

with a structure

inspired by the Bible.

The 200-word instruction set has since become the cornerstone of addiction

treatment in this country, where an estimated 23 million people grapple with

severe alcohol or drug abuse-more than twice the number of Americans

afflicted with cancer. Some 1.2 million people belong to one of AA's 55,000

meeting groups in the US, while countless others embark on the steps at one

of the nation's 11,000 professional treatment centers. Anyone who seeks help

in curbing a drug or alcohol problem is bound to encounter Wilson's system

on the road to recovery.

It's all quite an achievement for a onetime broken-down drunk. And Wilson's

success is even more impressive when you consider that AA and its steps have

become ubiquitous despite the fact that no one is quite sure how-or, for

that matter, how well-they work. The organization is notoriously difficult

to study, thanks to its insistence on anonymity and its fluid membership.

And AA's method, which requires "surrender" to a vaguely defined "higher

power," involves the kind of spiritual revelations that neuroscientists have

only begun to explore.

What we do know, however, is that despite all we've learned over the past

few decades about psychology, neurology, and human behavior, contemporary

medicine has yet to devise anything that works markedly better. "In my 20

years of treating addicts, I've never seen anything else that comes close to

the 12 steps," says Drew Pinsky, the addiction-medicine specialist who hosts

VH1's Celebrity

> Rehab. "In my world, if someone says they don't want to do the 12 steps, I

know they aren't going to get better."
Wilson may have operated on intuition, but somehow he managed to tap into

mechanisms that counter the complex psychological and neurological processes

through which addiction wreaks havoc. And while AA's ability to accomplish

this remarkable feat is not yet understood, modern research into behavior

dynamics and neuroscience is beginning to provide some tantalizing clues.
One thing is certain, though: AA doesn't work for everybody. In fact, it

doesn't work for the vast majority of people who try it. And understanding

more about who it does help, and why, is likely our best shot at finally

developing a system that improves on Wilson's amateur scheme for living

without the bottle.
AA originated on the worst night of Bill Wilson's life. It was December 14,

1934, and Wilson was drying out at Towns Hospital, a ritzy Manhattan detox

center. He'd been there three times before, but he'd always returned to

drinking soon after he was released. The 39-year-old had spent his entire

adult life chasing the ecstasy he had felt upon tasting his first cocktail

some 17 years earlier. That quest destroyed his career, landed him deeply in

debt, and convinced doctors that he was destined for institutionalization.
Wilson had been quite a mess when he checked in the day before, so the

attending physician, William Silkworth, subjected him to a detox regimen

known as the Belladonna