Herbert Fingarette; Patheos again

Herbert Fingarette, who died last year, was someone who was always opposed to Alcoholics Anonymous and the disease theory of Alcoholism, and believed the lie that alcoholics can moderately drink again. Indeed, Lance Dodes did some creative math with Fingarette’s numbers when concluding Alcoholics Anonymous has a 5% success rate:

University of California professor Herbert Fingarette cited two [...] statistics: at eighteen months, 25 percent of people still attended AA, and of those who did attend, 22 percent consistently maintained sobriety. [Reference: H. Fingarette, Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)] Taken together, these numbers show that about 5.5 percent of all those who started with AA became sober members.

The New York Times points out that Fingarette never did any alcoholism science himself:

Professor Fingarette acknowledged that he had not conducted any experimental or clinical studies into alcoholism; he reached his conclusions by analyzing scientific literature

Point being, not only did not Dodes multiply unrelated numbers to synthesize an artificially low number for AA’s success, but he used figures from an author who himself never published an alcoholism study.

Patheos

Patheos is one of the few places on the Internet where the same old debunked myths about AA having a “5% success rate” keep coming up again and again (the other two big offenders are Reddit, which has little regard for the actual truth but prefers a good fictional story, and TheFix). I posted this refutation to those old discredited numbers in a recent article there:

AA has, among those who are heavily involved with it, a 75% success rate over the short term, and a 67% rate over the long term (16 years later). These numbers have been consistent among multiple longitudinal studies, and are the same numbers AA members observed in the mid-1950s. To name just one study showing a high success rate among regular AA members, please see PMC2220012 (Moos and Moos 2006)

Indeed, the Surgeon General, in 2016 (during the Obama administration), stated that “Well-supported scientific evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of twelve-step mutual aid groups focused on alcohol and twelve-step facilitation interventions.”

Lance Dodes’s numbers concluding that AA has a 5% success rate are very dubious. Quite frankly, Dodes pulled the numbers out of his rear end: He multiplied unrelated numbers from multiple studies together to synthesize an artificially low number for AA’s success. His figures were so bad, multiple highly regarded treatment experts have criticized him, with one calling his reasoning a “pseudostatistical polemic”

People are welcome to their opinions, but not to their facts. The fact is that AA works among a significant subset of alcoholics (and, yes, atheists, there are agnostic AA meetings, or just use SMART/LifeRing/whatever, which appear to be about as effective as long as abstinence is the goal). Denying facts is what we accuse the superstitious of doing; it would be best if we did not do the same thing.

The old anti-AA talking points are being posted less

There have been very few articles posted by a major media outlet parroting false figures for AA efficacy since 2015, with Gabrielle Glaser’s highly biased and inaccurate article The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous.  That article, which has been refuted in the mainstream press (see “Why Alcoholics Anonymous Works” by Jesse Signal), is the last significant article criticizing AA’s efficacy. The only other articles more recent than that parroting the same inaccurate numbers are a 2018 Wired UK article by Stephen Armstrong (“The most popular treatment for alcoholism might be ineffective”) and a late 2018 article by a grade-B free newspaper called “The Stranger” entitled “This Drug Could Change Alcohol Addiction Treatment Forever” (there was also an opinion piece, not article, published in USA Today entitled “It took a village to kill my brother: How families, hospitals and government fail alcoholics” critical of AA’s success).

On the other hand, there have been a number of articles praising AA’s efficacy: Here’s a 2014 article; there is also a 2016 Forbes Article, a 2019 article published in a magazine for medical students praising AA’s success, and a 2018 Vox piece with a balanced view of AA’s real success.

The point being, mainstream media is more positive than negative towards AA as the 2010s end.