I just added this to Effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous:
Fiorentine 1999 was a 24-month longitudinal study measuring the effectiveness of AA and Narcotics Anonymous.
Like other longitudinal studies, it shows a strong correlation between
12-step attendance and being both clean from drugs and sober from
alcohol: People who went to 12-step meetings in the study had about a
75% success rate.
In more detail, at the 24 month follow up, 77.7% of people who went
to one or more meetings a week self-reported being clean; urinalysis was
very close to that figure, showing some 76.4% of the regular attenders
begin clean. For participants who did not regularly go to meetings, the
self reported figure for being clean was 56% and the drug test showed
57.9% being clean. The self-reported figures for alcohol abuse were
similar: 74.8% of regular 12-step attenders self-reported being
completely sober, but only 40% of people who did not go to 12-step
meetings claimed to be sober. Urinalysis showed 96.6% of people
regularly going to meetings as sober, in contrast to the 88.9% of people
who didn't go to meetings once a week or more whose urine sample was
alcohol-free.
The report then sees if 12-steps meetings have a specific effect (in
other words, if there is causation or merely correlation) by using
statistical analysis to compare participants self-reported level of
motivation, 12-step attendance, and successfully getting clean and
sober. The result of this observation was that "Weekly or more frequent
12-step participants are 1.59 times more likely than less-than-weekly
participants to maintain abstinence after controlling for the
differences in recovery motivation measured by the scale."
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Not added to that article: Lance Dodes falsely claims that Fiorentine 1999 states that "approximately 40 percent of individuals categorized as having continued active participation in AA maintained high rates of abstinence." and then multiplies an unrelated figure to falsely claim that AA has an 8% success rate. Fiorentine 1999 makes no such claim. No where in this paper does the above quote appear. I was unable to find this quote. Thomas Beresford was unable to find this quote. As far as either of us can tell, this quote is a figment of Dodes' imagination.
