Scribner's COMMENTATOR, January 1941

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
By THEODORE ENGLISH

New Year's resolutions, sanitariums and so-called cures are no help to many
who are afflicted with then drink habit. One plan has really worked for over 700 people, and more are being helped by it every day.



For publication, names are taboo, but it is impossible to tell the story of
how Alcoholics Anonymous has cured 700 alcoholics without mentioning Bill

Bill is a former alcoholic who learned to drink during the World War. When he came back he was successful in business except he drank too much. Gradually liquor became a necessity. Bath-tub gin, two bottles a day, and often three got to be routine, he says. A tumbler full of gin followed by a half dozen bottles of beer would be required if I were to eat any breakfast. He tried suicide, washed down the sedatives doctors gave him with more gin, and was pronounced hopeless by sanitariums.

And then on Armistice Day in 1934 as he sat drinking in his kitchen, he had a visit from a former alcoholic companion, who was sober. Bill couldn't understand.

Come, what's this all about? he asked. Are you really on the wagon?

I've got religion, his friend answered, refusing a drink. And then he told his story.

He had been taken to court and was about to be committed to an asylum, but two men had gotten him off by promising to help him stop drinking. They had given him a few simple principles to follow and he had been sober ever since. Bill could stop drinking if he asked God to help him. He did and hasn't taken a drink since.

Bill described his miraculous recovery to other alcoholics; it worked with them too, and they organized Alcoholics Anonymous to pass the word along to other drinkers. The cure is not medical, but spiritual, yet it pays allegiance to no church or sect. The alcoholic simply puts his
faith in some power greater than himself, and asks it to help free him from an overpowering habit. It makes no difference what a man calls this power or how he conceives of it so long as he believes in it. Most alcoholics recognize it as God, but atheists and agnostics have been
cured too. Bill has outlined the cure in twelve specific steps, which contain four major points.

1.Alcoholics must accept their inability to drink like normal people
They must become absolute abstainers.
2.But alcoholics can become abstainers only when they have asked for
divine assistance.
3.Then they must patch up the friendships and placate the enemies selfish drinking has
made. Anger and resentment are almost as great enemies as alcohol.

4.And to make the cure permanent, the alcoholic must pass the word
along to others, for faith without works is dead.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS is anonymous because it is a handicap to be known as a
former alcoholic, and because its members make helping others an avocation. They are interested only in helping others. They do not condemn drinking as an institution, and they admire those who can drink moderately. As alcoholics they cannot.

Alcoholism is a medical-not a moral problem. It is a form of sickness which baffles medicine and religion; exhortation and will power are also useless. Alcoholics are not bums, but able, intelligent people who are apparently normal in everything but their drinking. They have such a
constant craving for liquor that knowledge of its effect upon their health and happiness makes no lasting impression. They know that the first drink is poisonous, for it leads to another and another. But there is always an insanely trivial excuse for beginning the savage routine with
the first-just one this time. Alcoholics frequently drink themselves into unconsciousness. When they come to, they must calm their jitters with a little hair off the dog that bit them; this nip makes them feel like having another, and so it goes.

Alcoholics live in a little world of their own-just themselves and the bottle. They lose their jobs and their friends when they drink, and they drink when they have no job or friends. Alcoholic addiction develops insidiously from small beginnings. Most alcoholics have been social
drinkers, but the situations which apparently created a desire for more and more liquor are as varied as the cases. Men have begun drinking heavily when they failed-and when they succeeded.

I became acquainted with the 'hilarious life' just when I was beginning to
settle down, one ex-alcoholic writes in the book published by charter
members of Alcoholics Anonymous. My wife became pregnant and the doctor
recommended the use of beer. Somehow or other, I must have misunderstood the
doctor's instructions, for I not only made the beer for my wife, I also
drank it for her.

I discovered that a little shot of liquor now and then between beers put me
in a whacky mood much quicker than having to down several quarts of beer to
obtain the same results. I soon learned that beer made a very good wash for
whiskey. Yes sir, the old boiler-maker and his helper. The last day of my
drinking career, I drank twenty-two of them between 10 and 12 A.M.

And the consequences-

In two years I had ten different jobs ranging from newspaper copy desk and
rewrite to traffic director for an oil field equipment company. I was good
for at least ten days or two weeks of every two months I worked, getting
drunk and then half-heartedly sobering up.

For eight months my daily routine was steady drinking. Even after slumping
into bed late at night in a semi-stupor, I would get up at all hours and
drive to some all-night spot where I could get what I wanted.
All my troubles seemed to be piling up on me and liquor was the only refuge
I knew.

After holding good positions, making better than average income for over
ten years, I was in debt, had no clothes to speak of, no money, no friends,
and no one tolerating me but my wife.

The alcoholic makes resolutions: he will not drink before noon, he will
drink only beer, he will drink whiskey only with milk, he will take just one
drink, he will lay off altogether. Instead he often sells all his
possessions, including his clothes, for liquor. Church and friends can do
next to nothing with him-and doctors can do little more. One man had been to
a sanitarium one hundred times, and several others began drinking again in
ambulances on the way home from cures.

I remember one doctor, a former alcoholic writes, who thought a course of
seventy-two injections, three a week, after two weeks in a private hospital,
would supply the deficiency in my system that would enable me to stop
drinking. The night after the seventy-second injection I was paralyzed
drunk.

THERE ARE no qualifications for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous except a
genuine desire to get well. For this reason, the most promising recruits are
alcoholics of long standing. On the edge of collapse, they are ready to try
anything. People who have been cured find the best insurance-and sometimes
the only way to avoid a slip-is to help some one else. Members introduce
friends, but more often they call upon strangers.

One member, tempted to have the fatal one on a lonesome week-end, forgot
all about it when he called upon a minister who sent him to talk to several
members of his congregation. The Alcoholics have volunteered their services
to doctors, clergymen, endeavor societies, and State institutions. Every
Sunday, the State sends twenty alcoholic patients down from Rockland State
Hospital to a meeting in
New York City.

Alcoholics Anonymous has no dues or officers, and the membership expands
like a chain-letter. In five years it has grown to over 700. There are large
groups in New York, Cleveland and Akron. Smaller ones have been started in
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington and Houston.

The growth of the Houston group is an example of how members have enlisted
half the alcoholics they have encountered and cured two-thirds of them
through patience and sympathetic assistance. The man who started it is
Larry.About six months ago Larry was in Cleveland, where he had spent three
weeks trying to taper off a friend by drinking with him. The friend finally
went to a sanitarium, where Larry visited him and met several members of the
Cleveland Alcoholics Anonymous. A few days later when Larry was getting
thoroughly drunk in his hotel room, he had a visit from an unfamiliar member
of the Cleveland group. Larry wasn't interested. He wasn't an alcoholic; he
just needed a little self-control. So they went to a bar. The Alcoholic
drank coffee and bought Larry whiskey until he passed out.

The next evening when Larry was further gone than ever, he had another call
from his new friend. Again they went to a bar where the friend finally
persuaded Larry to go to a sanitarium, and drove him fifty
miles in a blizzard to one endorsed by Alcoholics Anonymous. After eight
hours of talk, the friend left at 4 A.M. Larry had taken his last drink. For
a week, members of Alcoholics Anonymous visited him every day and on the
fourth he accepted their program of recovery.

When he was discharged, his new friends lent him fare to Houston, where he
got a newspaper job. Three weeks later he began a series of articles about
Alcoholics Anonymous. The first one had hardly gotten into print when he
received a call for assistance. He answered them all and began forming a new
group. So far twenty people have been weaned and as many more introduced to
the Alcoholic's program. His newspaper has printed editorials about the
work, and Larry has traveled hundreds of miles
speaking before church and welfare groups.

WHEREVER Alcoholics Anonymous has an established group, all members meet
regularly to discuss their experiences and encourage each other. There is
fraternity, and there are reunions every week. Reunion is the only way to
describe one of the New York meetings I attended a few weeks ago.

It was held in a large studio of an uptown concert hall. About 130 people
men and women of all ages
and creeds were present. Three alcoholics shook hands and introduced
themselves to every one who came in. Every one looked comfortably prosperous
and extremely happy. All have gone through the
same experience and are glad to explain it to strangers, for they know that
only absolute frankness will satisfy the growing curiosity of churches and
the medical profession.

BILL told me something about the organization and how it has grown. Keeping
in touch with the various groups takes all his time now. The other men I
talked to were quite frank about their experiences. One of
them had just come from an uptown hotel, where he had been urging a prospect
to go to a hospital. Another had been a member about a year. I prayed the
Lord to help me stop drinking, he said. And
then I asked him to bring me some more customers, and He did that, too.

I've had nineteen jobs in sixteen years, a third man told me. The last
time I took a drink was at a Christmas party at the office. I'd been going
pretty good, so I thought I'd have just one. That was on
December 23 and I woke up on January 14.

The meeting itself consisted simply of talks by five ex-alcoholics. Each of
them described how his faith in a power greater than himself had eliminated
his desire for alcohol and brought renewed health, a job,
friends, and resistance to temptation. All of the talks were brief,
informal, and sincere. And in all of them was a repetitious theme; these
people had not only given up alcohol, but they had also found new and
happier lives aspirations to work for and accomplishments to be proud of.

The chairman, an attractive woman of thirty, put it this way. I first
thought that alcohol was the only thing the matter with me. And then faith
struck me between the eyes. I have learned more about faith in the
three months since my one slip than during the eleven months before when I
didn't touch a drop. All alcoholics are abnormal not enough to be insane,
but abnormal for them. We are all extremists. My greatest ambition now is to
be a normal human being.

The meeting lasted about an hour and a half. The stories told by the
speakers were familiar and encouraging because they renewed confidence in a
faith that has worked, does work, and will work with thousands of other
alcoholics. I am looking forward to the day, the chairman said, when we
will be able to hitch-hike across the country and stop at an Alcoholic house
every night.