And Romenesko has picked up on it!
A day after a Romenesko reader noted that Roger Ebert was an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor for reporters, A.A. sent a message to journalists on its email list. It says that “our fellowship does not comment on matters of public controversy, but we are happy to provide information about A.A. to anyone who seeks it.”
Check out some of the comments.
Alcoholics Anonymous Host Allegedly Sold Drugs at Meetings
“We took a closer look and realized what we had here was a pretty significant drug operation,” said Sgt. Sean Whitcomb with the Seattle Police Department.
[...]
“It’s like, show-up early, stay late and get your drugs and in-between,” Whitcomb said. “If you want to learn a little more about AA, we can talk about that too.”
The New Republic review of Anne M. Fletcher’s Inside Rehab: The Surprising Truth About Addiction Treatment-and How to Get Help That Works
Why Rehab Fails: The dogma of AA has taken over
My favorite two sentences in the Alcoholics Anonymous literature are: “Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its twelve steps are but suggestions.” When a drunk at the end of his tether, Bill Wilson, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1930s—a spiritual program based on meeting with other addicts—there was a fundamental humility to his ideology: It might work for some.
But that sentiment is often forgotten in the rooms of AA itself, where I spent a lot of time getting sober. There I found that what are suggestions to some are fundamentalist Scripture to others. In the rooms of AA, suggestions and traditions can sometimes feel more like ironclad laws, and when I inadvertently trespassed upon those laws, I was humiliated and rebuked. The predominantly AA-based culture of rehab in America has become one of imposition and tautology: If the program doesn’t work for you, then you didn’t work the program. If you succeed in staying sober, then you did a good job working the program; ergo, the program works.
h/t AntiDenial:
Parents Accuse AA of Harboring a Predator
LOS ANGELES (CN) – Grieving parents say in court that their daughter was murdered by her sociopathic addict boyfriend because Alcoholics Anonymous concealed his history of domestic violence. Eric Allen Earle allegedly strangled 31-year-old Karla Brada to death on Aug. 31, 2011, after Brada asked him to move out of her condo in Santa Clarita. After the murder, Earle reportedly spent the night sleeping next to Brada and called the authorities when he found her unresponsive in the morning.
From Ilse:
Here’s Stinkin’ Thinkin’ in its museum incarnation. All the posts and comments are available to read, but it’s no longer active. We won’t be posting (unless we have a really good reason or feel like it) and the comments have been disabled. You can read our goodbye post here.
If you’ve been a regular, you’ll notice that I took down the last two posts on the subject of Jim Bock and the Sponsorship Group in Chatham, NJ. I want to be clear that the episode detailed in those posts did not drive us to close the blog, so I’m going to tell the story again with more clarity.
Now then:
There is someone leaving comments on forums around the internet about someone named Jim Bock who runs the Sponsorship Group in Chatham, New Jersey. They’re hit-n-run cut/paste comments that look like this:
One of the all time most pathetic and dangerous AA groups ever is based out of Chatham NJ. They are called the Sponsorship Group and their leader is Jim B.
Dictator Jim B. and his disciples have been ruining the lives of young women since at least 2000. To call what they do “13th Stepping” would be a compliment. Imagine a group of people with no medical or psyciatric training that tell people how and why they need to stop taking necessary medication! It’s a disgrace. People have suffered and in some cases are dead as a direct result of this groups actions!
Jim B. and his disciples at the Sponsorship Group all have SG tatoo on their wrists and live by the rules of Jim B. He takes advatage of people who are in need of help. He should be charged with mental abuse and should have to register as a sex offender. He will experience KARMA soon.
A few of these comments appeared here (using the full last name), buried in the discussion section of random posts, and they were not on my radar.
So, last week, I received an email from Jim Bock that looked like this: Continue reading The Jim B. Episode, Revised and Expanded
Here is a fun story about Sheila “Hey Kool-Aid” Lockhart. A racehorse owner and serenity hornet in the UK:
How top racing figure rammed her friend’s car in fury over gossip
As the owner of a renowned racehorse named Go Ballistic, Sheila Lockhart might be expected to have an explosive temper.
So after she rammed her Audi into a Mercedes owned by jockey Warren Marston – sending it smashing through his front door as he slept, and prompting him to jump naked from his bed to shout abuse at her down the stairs – it would be easy to assume the worst.
The police certainly did, and matters escalated when they breathalysed Alcoholics Anonymous member Mrs Lockhart, 63, and found her over the drink drive limit.
The details of the events which preceded this little accident are in the linked story, but real entertainment is in Mrs Lockhart’s explanation of the events. Continue reading Hey, Kool-Aid!!!
The steps seem to be working for racecar driver Al Unser Jr. Sure, he got popped for a third drunk driving charge a few weeks ago – but this time he didn’t beat up his girlfriend or flee from the scene of an accident. I’d call that progress, and so does he:
Unser Making Progress After Relapse
“You know, considering the circumstances I’m under, things are going a lot better, but it’s still one day at a time,” he said. “So I’m back on my program and that sort of thing and we’re going to do the best we can and get over this speedbump that’s in my life.”
Nice work, Al!
Back in the late 1950s, a couple of researchers designed an experiment that was meant to measure a person’s cognitive dissonance. The subjects were put into a room, where they sat in front of a box full of a dozen spools, each sitting upright in rows of three. They were told to take the spools out of the box in a certain order, and then to put them back into the box as they were before. Then to do it over and over again until they were told to stop.
Next, the subjects had some wooden cubes placed in front of them in rows. They were asked to take each cube, and rotate it clockwise one turn. And then they were asked to do it over again with each cube, and to keep repeating that until they were asked to stop. Both tasks were by design boring and tedious, and took about an hour. Continue reading How You Were Duped, Why You Believed, The Reason You Stayed
