12 Steps to . . . ?

Yesterday I offered my help to an addiction recovery ministry and the response was they had a 12 step program and were 'all covered'. I bit my tongue and walked away but could not sleep last night. My burden is that so many people are fooled into thinking that 12 step programs have the answer.
I have attended AA meetings. Many started with the reading of a statement that said (among other things), that this Twelve-Step program has rarely been known to fail, except for a few unfortunate people who are "constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves". (You can look at this statement in A.A. Big Book). It amazed me how everyone just sat there and smiled while what was being said could not be further from the truth. There are two things wrong with this statement. First, people are not constitutionally incapable of knowing truth about themselves and second, independent statistics prove failure is not a rarity!

Because of the nature of the programs themselves (they are anonymous remember) we are prevented from getting accurate figures. Yet anyone who seriously examines this issue will discover that the true figures are at least 90% failure rate with the 12 step programs. In my research the actual numbers I come up with are more like 95 to 100% failure!

"How do you say 100%?" you might ask' I can explain it this way:
A 5% success rate is nothing more than the rate alcoholics and drug addicts quit on their own. That's right, 5% per year will stop because they decide to stop. Now if you have ever met anyone in AA or NA you will be told that this is just not true, no one can quit successfully that way, they are just fooling themselves. Well you don't have to only take my word for it.

The Harvard Medical School reported that in the long run, the rate of spontaneous remission in alcoholics is slightly over 50 percent. That means that the annual rate of spontaneous remission is around 5 percent. (Treatment of Drug Abuse and Addiction - Part III, The Harvard Mental Health Letter, Volume 12, Number 4, October 1995, page 3.
(See Aug. (Part I), Sept. (Part II), Oct. 1995 (Part III).)

Therefore, any treatment program that has a 5% success rate really has no success at all. A 100% failure rate! None of us can take credit for those who would have done it anyway. And worse, if the success rate is less than 5%, then they are having a negative impact.

I don't expect you to just believe me but I do pray you check it out for yourself. Just go to Google and search for "12 Step programs statistics". I do believe this is important.