AA and rehab culture have shockingly low success rates, and made it impossible to have real debate about addiction
It would be more worthwhile to look at the stats based on how many people actually want to be there (vs how many people are being forced there by the courts / family / friends). No one will get and stay sober unless they want to get sober. For some reason, just about every misdemeanor now ends with 4 weeks AA. If 50% of the people attending AA are simply there because the courts told them to be there, we shouldn't include those people into the fail/success rates.
I think we don't know any of that. It would be inte aaresting if voluntary aa treatment has better efficiency. I don't think we have a valid model of addiction. We all 'know' what it is but i don't think we really do.
AA isn't the only problem. The Rat Park study suggests most addiction research may be fundamentally flawed (here's a great comic about it, if you like that format). TLDR the Rat Park results suggest addiction is far more complex than simple chemical addiction. That individuals may use these drugs because they're depressed and fundamentally unhappy with their lives. Further, that psychological fulfillment may far outweigh chemical dependence, in terms of breaking addiction. Previously addicted rats placed in an enriched environment preferred withdrawal to continued opiate usage. But it's only one study. We need more research.
Also relevant: Ibogaine.
I think this is a step towards a better model of addiction. But of course like most things in america the drug war is really about race. About Hallucinogens as alcoholism treatments this is at the core of the Peyote movement among Native Americans
I haven't seen much evidence of Bill W ever claiming any science to what he did, nor any of his followers doing said-same. AA has always had a spiritual framework and owes a lot more to Dale Carnegie than Freud or Erickson. It's also clumsy and dishonest to conflate AA with "rehab." Although there is overlap, rehabilitation is a broad category of treatments and services applied to a panoply of ills through countless modalities. AA is a rigid, structured, controlled hierarchy of talk therapies applied by a semi-gnostic central organization. I mean, the damn article lists the twelve steps. Of those twelve, four of them name-check God and two more allude to him. Accusing AA of "pseudoscience" is disingenuous in the extreme.
Using the folk definition of pseudoscience you might be right although it fits exactly Latakos definition.
e.i. it is a defective and retrograde program. It does not produce results or lead to novel truths. Using Popper's definition nothing most folks call pseudoscience makes the cut. Although strangely enough economics does. Under that regime i think it is grouped with alt medicine in the category of bullshit.
To me the worst part of 12 step is that it is bad poetry It infects the language with banality No artist should go anywhere near it.