Perhaps the most widely known statistic showing AA's ineffectiveness relative to other treatment methods is the 5 percent success rate -- that served as a centerpiece statistic in The Sober Truth, a 2014 expose by former Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes of the bad science behind AA. In fact, he gathered the statistic from AA’s own surveys. Every three years since 1968 AA has randomly queried several thousands of its members for basic info -- age, career, gender, how they came to AA, and length of sobriety. One of the questions AA asks is the month and year when they first came into AA. In 1990, the AA member who analyzed the results used the data to "show the probability that a member will remain in the Fellowship a given number of months." He calculated that out of every hundred people who came into AA, eighty leave within a month. At the three-month mark, only ten remain. At one year, that number has dwindled to five.
Seems straightforward: AA fails ninety-five percent of the people who come in the door.In other words, the author has completely disregarded any real research on AA’s success done in the last decade. Indeed, Miller did not correctly read The Sober Truth, since Dodes does concede that that old 1990 AA survey shows a 26% retention rate. Dodes’s book uses another trick to make up the 5% success rate figure, which is also inaccurate (he multiplies numbers from unrelated studies to cook up that artificial 5% figure).
If Miller can not get basic facts about AA’s success rate correct, I see no need to waste my time reading any more of this poorly researched book.
Fortunately, this book did not get the level of press that Dodes’s poorly argued 2014 polemic got.
