Gresham's Law and Alcoholics Anonymous 7
The facts of the situation in AA which prompted the
rewording of the Twelfth Step and the adding of the explanatory appendix to the Big Book could have been
summarized in this way:
"It is now possible to recover in one of two ways in AA. Option one is the original, spiritual experience way which
follows from working all of the Steps. Option two is the way of partial practice of the Steps, and primary
dependence on the social, fellowship related aspects of life in AA. This second approach generally does not
produce a spiritual experience as strong, full-program AA practice does. It also violates our tradition that we
should always place principles before personalities. But in its favor, it requires less commitment and less work; it
involves less in the way of life rearrangement; and it has proven itself sufficient in many cases to
produce lasting abstinence from drinking." But no such statement was ever made, and the switch in terms from
spiritual experience to spiritual awakening had the net effect of clouding in everyone's mind the real nature of
the change which had come about.
It was not a matter of conscious deception on anyone’s part. It was just a failure to see a dividing into two camps when it had occurred. This would have been an easy mistake in any case for those living through that period in AA's history, a quite understandable failure to see a trend developing, comparable to a mother's inability to notice growth changes in her own child. But in a movement committed almost before all else to the avoidance of controversy, blindness to this split was all but inevitable.
The drawback to the original, rigorous, strong-cup-of-coffee approach to the AA program was that it required new members to plunge into a drastic program of spiritual transformation, a course which has never in history had appeal with large masses of people. Had the original approach remained the only approach, it is doubtful that AA would have reached anything like its present size of 850,000 members. (1976)
But the weak-cup-of-coffee practice had even more serious flaws built into it. The relatively superficial life change which it produces is sufficient to get some alcoholics sober. It is not adequate - it is not effective - it simply doesn't work - for a very large number of others. This is particularly evident with the "hard" cases - the alcoholics who have been badly beat up physically and mentally before they arrive at their first AA meeting; the people whose alcoholism is complicated with drug abuse, perversion, criminal or psychotic tendencies, or a streak of psychopathology; and the "slippers," those who have developed a pattern of hanging around AA, staying sober for periods, but relapsing repeatedly into drinking. (Generally, the slippers are alcoholics with psychopathic tendencies who keep coming back to AA but are unwilling or unable to work with root principles, notably rigorous honesty.) Weak AA does not touch most of these people. They cannot stay sober that way.
Yet if these hard cases find their way into an environment where strong AA, and nothing but strong AA, is being practiced, many of them are able to achieve lasting sobriety. The East Ridge Community in upstate New York has worked with hundreds of these tough drunks over the past twelve years. Strong AA is the standard fare at East Ridge, and they have a recovery rate of over seventy percent with these so-called AA failures. No success turns to success for the lion's share of them when weak AA is replaced with strong AA.
There is another, more insidious, danger built into weak AA. In many cases the "recovery" produced by watered down approaches to the Twelve Steps fails to hold up over the long haul. What looked in the beginning like an easier, softer way to maintain happy sobriety yields progressively less and less contentment, finally ending in a complete reversal of momentum and a relapse into serious personal misery. The end result may be a return to active alcoholism; or, short of that total disaster, it may be a sinking out into a life of discontented abstinence, marred by some combination of tension, resentment, depression, compulsive sick sex, and an overall sense of meaninglessness. Either way, it is a final failure to reap the benefits of the AA program; it is, in the last analysis, a failure to recover.
Two disturbing tendencies are noticeable in contemporary AA. One is toward a lower recovery rate overall. For the first twenty years, the standard AA recovery estimate was seventy-five percent. AA experience was that fifty percent of the alcoholics who came to AA got sober right away and stayed sober. Another twenty-five percent had trouble for a while but eventually got sober for good, and the remaining twenty-five percent never made a recovery. Then there was a period of some years when AA headquarters stopped making the seventy-five percent recovery claim in their official literature. In 1968, AA's General Service Organization published a survey indicating an overall recovery rate of about sixty-seven percent. The net of all this seems to be that as AA has gotten bigger and older, its effectiveness has dropped from about three in four to about two in three. (Note: two in three was in 1976 - our data shows numbers much LESS in 1997 - 1 in 15 )
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