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Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a mutual-aid recovery support group for people having problems with alcohol. AA is a nonprofit, anonymous, nonprofessional, and self-supporting fellowship that stresses the importance of total abstinence. AA defines alcoholism as a physical compulsion and a psychological obsession, as well as a spiritual disease. Members identify themselves as alcoholics regardless of how long they have been sober. Alcoholism is considered a lifelong disease. Members can recover and become sober alcoholics, but never former alcoholics. Meetings are led by group members and can either be open to the public or limited to members only. Meetings include group discussions, sharing of personal problems, and feedback from other members.

The 12 Steps of AA require members to first accept that they are powerless over alcohol. Next AA members come to believe in a “Power” greater than themselves. They then turn their “will” and “lives over to the care of God” as they understand “Him” and take an ongoing “moral inventory” of their own behaviors. They then confess their wrongs and ask God to remove their “defects of character.” This is followed by making amends to those they have wronged. Members pray and meditate to maintain a connection to God in order to know God's will and carry it out. Then, “having had a spiritual awakening,” AA members carry the message of AA to others and strive to practice the principles expressed in the 12 Steps in all aspects of their lives.

AA was also an organizational innovation. AA is organized around the 12 Traditions that outline the means by which AA maintains its unity and relates itself to the world around it. Among these traditions is the requirement for membership (only the desire to stop drinking), the assertion that each AA group should be autonomous and self-supporting, that AA should never “endorse, finance or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise,” that AA should remain nonprofessional, and that AA has no opinion on outside issues.

History and Scope

AA was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, who are referred to as Bill W. and Dr. Bob by AA members. Bill W. and Dr. Bob began their recoveries from alcoholism through the Oxford Group, a nondenominational Christian evangelical organization prominent in the 1920s and 1930s. The two men found that sharing about their alcoholism with each other was therapeutic, and they began recruiting other alcoholics with whom to share, eventually leaving the Oxford Group to form what would become AA. They adapted Oxford Group principles into what later became the 12 Steps, the central guidelines of the AA program. In 1939 AA first published its basic text for recovery, Alcoholics Anonymous, also known as the Big Book, and soon took this title as the name of their group.

What began as two alcoholics meeting and talking to help keep each other sober has expanded into the largest organization of mutual-aid recovery support groups in the world, with over 2 million members in over 116,000 groups around the world. The success of the AA 12-Step program has led to the creation of hundreds of other 12-Step groups for other addictions and problems, such as Narcotics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. In the United States, nearly one in every 10 adults has attended an AA meeting, and more than one in eight has been to a 12-step meeting of some kind. Today, AA's 12-Step program has become institutionalized in the American treatment system, and many for-profit enterprises have appropriated AA ideas, approaches, and symbols. AA has also influenced drug policy.

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