http://web.archive.org/web/200306042023 ... ancel.htmlPUBLIC HEALTH WARNING:
Addiction Recovery Groups (RG's)
are Hazardous to your Life, Your Health,
Your Mental Health, Your Liberty, Your Civil Rights,
Your Safety, Your Dignity, and Your Pursuit of Happiness!
The addiction recovery group (RG) is an invention of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), an expansionist, religious organization patterned after the now-defunct, evangelical Oxford Group. AA's 12-step philosophy conflicts sharply with all of the world's great religions, contradicts sound concepts of mental health, and has no legitimate place in any of the trusted helping professions.
The 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous does not work with substance addictions, and poses serious risks to your health, safety, family relationships, and general well-being.
For every person present at an AA meeting, there are a thousand absent who dropped out for various reasons. Did they all die of addictions? Are they miserable dry drunks? Hardly. Self-recovery is far more commonplace than recovery in RG's. About 80% of all who actually defeat their addictions do it without RG's or addiction treatment. They usually become normal, happy people.
Abstinence simply means not drinking alcohol or using drugs. When people stop intoxicating themselves, they stop causing the related problems, and their other problems become manageable. Sobriety, within the recovery group movement, means conforming to the group's beliefs about life, love, and leisure. Recovery groups do not produce abstinence. They often discuss abstinence, usually calling it something else, like "sobriety," "serenity," or "rationality." When people do abstain, it is tentative, and the recovery group takes credit. When people "relapse," the group accepts no responsibility.
A safe guess is that about 2% - 5% of those who try AA become consistently abstinent, and even those refuse to consider themselves permanently abstinent. The same figures apply to addiction treatment programs, which are little more than expensive introductions to AA, or exercises in pop-psychology, always with long-term "aftercare."
AA declares that substance addiction is a disease that is chronic and fatal unless one submits to the 12-step program of AA. Part of that program involves proselytizing AA in society, convincing others that human beings, once addicted to a substance, are powerless to solve that problem independently from the 12-step program.
AA's outrageous claims of effectiveness and universality preceded and overshadowed its own poor success record; by the time it became apparent that the 12-step program is worthless as a means to defeat addictions, energetic AAers had already achieved significant public relations victories. In the last few decades, recovery groups have gained immense popularity, and substance addiction has flourished everywhere.
Responding to various political and economic pressures, federal, state, and local governments have adopted the RG format as a means to create a new social order. The result is that the mass media, the public health and social welfare systems, and the helping professions have accepted, in the complete absence of objective evidence, that addiction is a disease, that addicted people are victims of addictive disease, and that there are actually "treatments" for the disease of addiction.
A Message for Public Administrators
and Elected Officials
So ingrained is AA's disease concept of addiction, that tax-suported public health messages declare that addiction is a disease, that addiction treatment works, and that if one is suffering from addiction to alcohol and drugs, one should urgently "get help," meaning to go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous or its family-oriented clone, Al-Anon. Never has a public addiction agency recommended or even suggested that people troubled by alcohol or drug addiction should immediately and permanently discontinue the use of alcohol or drugs. Instead, it is simply assumed nowadays that anyone with a drug or alcohol problem is afflicted with addictive disease, and by definition incapable of self-recovery. Consequently, subtance abusers have little expectation of themselves to cease and desist from any further use of the offending substances. This is the first example of serious harm done to multitudes of addicted people by the government, the mass media, and by the helping professions.
Rational Recovery urges you to avoid recovery groups of any type like the plague, because that is what they truly are. You can do much better on your own. To follow, are specific risks to your health, happiness, and safety posed by your government, the mass media, and by the health professions. These risks have been compiled from the direct, painful experience of many thousands of people who have called Rational Recovery in the last twelve years.
No group meeting is confidential, but groupers convey that anonymity means the meetings are confidential. RG's are not confidential. They are public meetings, regardless of whether they are "closed" or open. Groupers are not trustworthy, and will readily use what they know about you against you. They value the unity of the group above any individual; they care for the program more than for the people who come for help.
Recovery groupers, by their presence at meetings, expose the fact that they have not solved the problem of addiction. In other words, they are irresolute substance abusers, uncertain about whether they will drink or use drugs in the future,who have a need to transmit their own insecurity to newcomers. These are not people from whom to seek help, wisdom, or guidance of any kind.
The recovery group is like a pool filled with non-swimmers. Whether you can swim or not, they will pull you down in order to survive.
The groups serve to undermine your confidence that you can remain abstinent without their social support and the 12-step religious philosophy. They will predict, "You will drink again," each time you object to AA doctrine. The groups belittle self-inspired abstinence, calling that solution "the dry drunk," or a "pink cloud." AA does not believe in your ability to abstain from alcohol, nor your ability to think wisely or manage your personal affairs. Naturally, this supports your addiction and not you.
RG's invariably define recovery as a group project, a process involving social support. They present some spiritual, religious, or psychological philosophy as an essential element in defeating an addiction, defining recovery as the outcome of a personal conversion to the group's beliefs or preconceived mindset. In a strange twist of logic, the disease concept regards addiction as a symptom of philosophical error, either spiritual or psychological. RG philosophies usually conflict sharply with traditional moral precepts, such as right and wrong, good and evil, or other original family values. Meetings focus entirely upon philosophical matters, never upon how to efficiently quit an addiction. In fact, the groups will prevent people from taking aggressive, independent action on the problem, labeling such behavior as "denial" or "dry-drunk" or "pink cloud" or "stinking thinking."
