And what of AA own published "success rate"? Since they don't have one, you must fall back on their own internal documents that have made it into the public domain.
Remember, this is from the horses mouth (or the other end).
"For many years in the 1970s and 1980s, the AA GSO (Alcoholics Anonymous General Service Organization) conducted triennial surveys where they counted their members and asked questions like how long members had been sober. Around 1990, they published a commentary on the surveys: Comments on A.A.'s Triennial Surveys [no author listed, published by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., New York, no date (probably 1990)]. The document has an A.A. identification number of "5M/12-90/TC". The document was produced for A.A. internal use only. It has a graph on page 12 (Diagram C-1) that shows that newcomers drop out, relapse, leave, or disappear at a staggeringly high rate.8 Averaging the results from the five surveys from 1977 to 1989 yielded these numbers:
81% are gone (19% remain) after 1 month;
90% are gone (10% remain) after 3 months,
93% are gone (7% remain) after 6 months,
and 95% are gone (5% remain) at the end of one year.
Figure C-1 from page 12 of the Commentary on the Triennial Surveys (from 1977 to 1989), A.A. internal document number 5M/12-90/TC
Also see: Addiction, Change & Choice; The New View of Alcoholism, Vince Fox, M.Ed. CRREd., page 66
That gives A.A. a maximum possible success rate of only 5% (even if you define "success" as staying sober for only one year). That is not what a competent doctor would call good medical treatment. The FDA would never approve a medicine that is only successful on 5% of the patients.
But not even all of those five percent who "Keep Coming Back" for a year are continuously sober. Some of them relapse repeatedly. Those triennial surveys only showed how many people kept coming back to meetings, not how many of them stayed sober for the full year. And then the attrition continues as more and more people leave, year after year. Old-timers with 20 years of sobriety are as rare as hen's teeth. Fewer than one newcomer in a thousand makes it for that long. Such old-timers are treated like visiting royalty when they come to speak at A.A. meetings, just because they are so rare.
Note that we are not told exactly how the GSO decides who is a member. The most likely criterion is the one used by Bill C. in 1965. Charles Bufe pointed out that in a 1965 article in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Bill C. considered anyone who had attended 10 or more meetings to be a member.5 But that eliminates from the statistics all of those people who came looking for help, and attended a few or several meetings, but who were so put off by the religiosity and cultishness and faith-healing atmosphere that they stopped coming back.
If all of those people were included in the numbers, it would "water down" the claimed retention rate and the claimed success rate to the point where they would be truly pathetic. We would get numbers like, "95% are gone in a month, and 99% are gone in a year."
Actually, the truth might be even worse than that. It seems that the ABC News program 20/20 did a special on recovery that quoted an A.A. spokesman who said that 95% of the newcomers do not even come back for a second meeting.
And also note that the claimed five percent of A.A. newcomers who are still coming back after one year (and sober, we hope) is exactly the same number as the normal rate of spontaneous remission among alcoholics. If we subtract the usual spontaneous remission rate from A.A.'s claimed success rate, we get zero percent for A.A.'s actual effective cure rate. A.A. didn't make anybody quit drinking -- those who quit were the ones who were going to quit anyway. They would have quit anyway, no matter what group they were in, be it the Patty-Cake Treatment Program or the Mickey Mouse Club.
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-eff ... b_memorial