An A.A. success rate​ of one percent Is statistically impossible

by Glenn F. Chesnut, Ph.D.

This article originally appeared on April 9, 2010, in the AA History Lovers, see http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/AAHistoryLovers/message/6439

It is statistically impossible for AA to have only a 1% success rate.

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.)

​ttp://www.niaaa.nih.gov/NewsEvents/NewsReleases/nlaes.htm See​ h

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.**

________________________

A success rate of only 2% or 5% would also in fact be statistically impossible

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 AA History Lovers 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 one­year 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. They would at best insert a footnote into their own work citing from a garbled and confused account which Richard K. had published himself by running off copies of his typescript on a photocopying machine, referring to that work in their own footnotes as though it was a scholarly book published by an accredited academic press.

Dick B. in Hawaii flooded the internet with references to Richard K. and the 5% figure to such an extent that even serious scholars began assuming that the 5% figure must be correct, “because it was all over the internet and everybody was citing it.” Dick B. was insisting on this 5% figure so fanatically, because he was pushing his theory that modern AA could “once more” attain its supposed early 50% success rate once again, if only modern AA’s would start praying to Jesus, and getting down on their knees and accepting him as their savior, and regarding his death on the cross as the substitutionary atonement for all their sins, and reading from the King James Version of the New Testament during all their AA meetings.

________________________

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 ballpark estimate, this 40% figure matches up at least reasonably well with some very well done National Institute of Health studies.

So a 26% one­year retention rate corresponds 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.

________________________

*The official A.A. figures, which show an A.A, membership in the U.S. of around one million, are very conservative — the National Institute of Health surveys show that there are quite a few more Americans than that who are sober because of having attended A.A. meetings, including an appreciable number who have stopped attending meetings but are still staying totally away from alcohol. ________________________

**By way of comparison, there were 50,000 in attendance at the Minneapolis AA International convention in 2000, and 50,000 at the Toronto AA International convention in 2005. But we can look around and see, by simple observation all over the United States, that only a small percentage of American AA members have the money and time to attend one of these international conventions. And incredibly dedicated attendees from outside the U.S. and Canada formed only a minority, in spite of their impact as a highly visible symbol of AA’s worldwide spread. ________________________

***Let’s say we have a four­year university program, like the undergraduate programs at Indiana University, only at this university, nobody ever drops out, and nobody is ever flunked out. We enroll 1,000 new students every year:

1st year students: 1,000 = 25% of the 4,000 total 2nd year students: 1,000 = 25% of the 4,000 total 3rd year students: 1,000 = 25% of the 4,000 total

4th year students: 1,000 = 25% of the 4,000 total

Does this mean that 75% of the students are flunked out, and that only 25% successfully gain their degrees? Of course not! The ratio of 4th year students to 1st year students is 1,000/1,000 (or 25/25, whichever way you choose to phrase it) which means a one hundred percent success rate.

During the 33 years I taught at Indiana University, we in fact performed these calculations every year — although we in fact did have a certain percentage of students who dropped out or were flunked out every year — in order to keep an eye on any places where we might have an abnormally high ratio of students failing to make it, so that we could attempt remedial measures of some sort.

In the A.A. Triennial Surveys, 19% of the people in their first year of attending A.A. meetings were in their first month of attending A.A., while 5% of the first year people were in their twelfth month of attending A.A. If we take that 5/19 ratio — 5 divided by 19 — this comes out to 26%.