There are about 1 million A.A. members in the U.S., according to the official A.A. statistics.*
Now if 100 raving alcoholics had to come to A.A. in order for just one of them to get sober (while the other 99 went back to smashing cars, being unable to hold jobs, and getting into fist fights in bars),
that would mean that 99 million raving alcoholics would have had to have come to A.A. meetings and failed, to balance out that paltry 1 million who got sober.
The U.S. population is about 300 million.
That would mean that one third of the people in the U.S., men, women, and children -- AT A BARE MINIMUM -- must be raving alcoholics, running into one another drunkenly on the highways and bumping into one another as they stagger down the pavement.
But according to the National Institutes of Health News for Mar. 17, 1995, only 4.38 % of persons aged eighteen and older in the U.S. suffer from alcohol dependence (that is, the kind of chronic hardcore alcoholism which A.A. was developed to treat). That is only around ten million alcoholics in the U.S. -- not a hundred million!(An additional 3.03 % drink too much for their own good, but would be able to quit using their own will power if given a sufficient reason to do so.)
See http://www.niaaa. nih.gov/NewsEven ts/NewsReleases/ nlaes.htm
Do you see the problem? There are only about 10 million chronic hardcore alcoholics in the United States. If A.A. were only capable of getting 1% of alcoholics sober, there could be at most only 100,000 A.A. members in the whole United States.**
If A.A. were capable of getting only 2% of alcoholics sober, that would still necessitate that there only be 200,000 A.A. members in the whole United States, and that one sixth of the people in the United States were raving alcoholics, ALL of whom had tried getting sober in A.A., even though only 98% of them succeeded.
How about the 5% figure? If all 10 million of the people in the U.S. who suffer from alcoholism had gone to at least a few A.A. meetings, then it is true, that if 5% of these got sober in A.A., that we could account for a total A.A. membership of 500,000. But that would only be half of the real count, and it would require that ALL of the alcoholics in the U.S. had gone to at least a few A.A. meetings -- which we know is not true.
(And anyway, the 5% figure was a blatant error from the beginning. It came originally from a man named Richard K., who belonged to the AAHistoryLovers back then, and who did not know how to read the statistical tables in the A.A. Triennial Surveys. I remember well how a number of us tried to show him how he was misreading the tables -- that the 5% figure at one place was NOT the one-year success rate, merely the percentage of the people at these A.A. meetings who were in their twelfth month of attending A.A.*** -- but he continued to insist that his misreading was correct. And then, God help us, this blatant misreading began being repeated by certain other people on the internet, without these people remotely bothering to check where that figure had come from or who had dreamed it up.)
Now let's look at a serious figure instead.
The A.A. Triennial Membership Surveys for 1977 through 1989 show that, of those people who are in their first month of attending A.A. meetings, 26% will still be attending A.A. meetings at the end of that year. That means that we would have to run 4 million people roughly through a few A.A. meetings in order to come out with 1 million people who stay in A.A. and get a bit of sobriety. With 10 million people in the U.S. classified as alcohol dependent, that means that we would have to conclude that nowadays about 40% of the alcoholics in the U.S. end up with a little bit of contact with A.A. at one time or another during their lives. And in fact, as a ball park estimate, this 40% figure matches up at least reasonably well with some very well done National Institute of Health studies.
SO A 26 % ONE-YEAR RETENTION RATE MATCHES UP FAIRLY WELL with the other statistics which we possess -- and with common sense observations we can make -- about A.A. in the modern United States.And of those who "really try" -- as for example, by continuing to go to A.A. meetings for more than 90 days -- according to the modern A.A. Triennial Membership Surveys, 56% of those people will still be attending A.A. meetings at the end of that year.Hmmm -- 56% of those who "really try" seem to be able to get sober in modern A.A. -- sounds suspiciously like the old time claims from back in the 1930's and 40's, when they said that 50% of the people who came to A.A. and "really tried" were able to get sober.
Glenn C.
South Bend, Indiana
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