Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Glaser got the Sobell story wrong

I am not about to read, much less point by point refute, all of Gabrielle Glaser's over 8000 word anti-AA screed published in The Atlantic this month.  However, the 300 or so words she writes about the Sobell study and its aftermath are inaccurate.  For me to properly comment on it, I need to give readers here the entire content of what Glaser wrote on that Sobell study:
To many, though, the idea of non-abstinent recovery is anathema.

No one knows that better than Mark and Linda Sobell, who are both psychologists. In the 1970s, the couple conducted a study with a group of 20 patients in Southern California who had been diagnosed with alcohol dependence. Over the course of 17 sessions, they taught the patients how to identify their triggers, how to refuse drinks, and other strategies to help them drink safely. In a follow-up study two years later, the patients had fewer days of heavy drinking, and more days of no drinking, than did a group of 20 alcohol-dependent patients who were told to abstain from drinking entirely. (Both groups were given a standard hospital treatment, which included group therapy, AA meetings, and medications.) The Sobells published their findings in peer-reviewed journals.

In 1980, the University of Toronto recruited the couple to conduct research at its prestigious Addiction Research Foundation. “We didn’t set out to challenge tradition,” Mark Sobell told me. “We just set out to do good research.” Not everyone saw it that way. In 1982, abstinence-only proponents attacked the Sobells in the journal Science; one of the writers, a UCLA psychologist named Irving Maltzman, later accused them of faking their results. The Science article received widespread attention, including a story in The New York Times and a segment on 60 Minutes.

Over the next several years, four panels of investigators in the United States and Canada cleared the couple of the accusations. Their studies were accurate. But the exonerations had scant impact, Mark Sobell said: “Maybe a paragraph on page 14” of the newspaper.
(Emphasis mine) 

I watched that 60 Minutes segment when it came out. It helped save my life. It is very telling that Glaser does not describe what that segment said. Glaser gives the false impression that the critics merely had issues with the Sobells’s honesty. What Glaser is not telling her readers is what happened to those 20 people who the Sobells tried controlled drinking with: Four died drunk. Eight – make that nine – were engaging in out of control drinking. Six were abstaining from alcohol altogether. Only one of those 20 people in the Sobell study was able to achieve long-term controlled drinking.

The panel who investigated the Sobells merely found that the Sobells did not commit fraud; the contemporary New York Times story describing the report points out that “The Federal panel found that the Sobells overstated their success in one passage of a 1978 book” and that
“The panel also found that the Sobells made incorrect statements about the number of times they contacted patients.”

That is a far cry from Glaser’s assertion that “[The Sobells’s] studies were accurate.” The panel made so such conclusion, and Glaser should not be implying that they did. There’s a world of difference between not deliberately lying and making an accurate survey.

This is not the first time I’ve seen Glaser give the wrong impression. In a previous hit piece attacking the 12-step programs, she implied that Joanne Fry was the sponsor for Karla Brada, who, like many alcoholics, died drunk. Joanne Fry has since flat out denied ever being Karla’s sponsor, and Glaser never directly stated that Joanne was her sponsor, but tried to imply it.