12 Steps to Nowhere?
By J. Timothy Hunt
From Saturday Night
I t was a run-of-the-mill 9-1-1 call, a guy with the DTs, or delirium tremens, from alcohol withdrawal. I don’t think my partner and I even turned on the siren. At the apartment, we found an unshaven, grey-haired man sitting in a threadbare recliner. He had an embarrassed grin on his face. His hands were violently trembling, and the place stank of booze.
A big part of my job as a New York City Fire Department emergency medical technician was picking up drunks—“frequent flyers.” Typically, they were smelly, annoying, uncooperative characters. On this call my partner, a female veteran of the force, told the patient he needed to pull himself together and stop drinking. Only she put it a lot more colourfully.
The rheumy-eyed old fellow just sat there. As I took his blood pressure, he looked me in the eye. That look gave me the shivers. A second later his hands stopped shaking. He seized and died.
After work I went to see a movie with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and got hammered. I’d had patients die on me before, but this was different. The way he’d looked into my eyes, it was as if he’d known that I often went to the movies to get drunk; as if he knew that I, too, had a big drinking problem. I don’t remember how I got home that night.
I may seem like a perfect candidate for Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, I’ve made it a point to avoid AA at all costs. Why? Because for the vast majority of people with an alcohol dependence, AA is useless.
Statistics Canada reports that about 641,000 Canadians age 15 or older are dependent on alcohol. That’s about 2.6 percent of us. Some 324,000 people claim they cannot resist a strong urge to drink heavily at least once a month. These are the folks routinely directed by well-meaning advice columnists, the court system and even health-care professionals to AA meetings.
Founded in 1935 and with an estimated membership of two million in more than 180 countries, one would imagine that there are reams of scientific data showing the effectiveness of the AA philosophy, or that AA would initiate clinical studies of its own to prove its value. Not so: No official membership or attendance records are kept at any level. An internal document, prepared in 1990 based on the last five of AA’s triennial surveys of a random sample of a portion of its members, showed that after one year, a mere five percent of people who joined AA remained with the program.
One thing we know about alcohol abuse is that each year, in any given group of alcoholics, approximately five percent spontaneously abandon their addiction. Over time, about 50 percent of alcoholics manage to free themselves from their dependence. Of course, 50 percent don’t. Are the five percent who maintain a long-term relationship with AA the same people who would have quit drinking anyway? It’s hard to say.
According to a study referenced in The Harvard Mental Health Letter, about 80 percent of the people who manage to get sober for a year or more do it without any treatment or formal support group.
Although I made it a point never to drink on duty, I had few other boundaries. I drank alone. I drank in bed. I packed liquor in my suitcases. I stole liquor from my friends. I vomited in public. I blacked out. I drove drunk. When I quit the N.Y.C. Fire Department (astonishingly, with an exemplary record) and moved to Toronto, I remained a highly functional drunk.
And then one day I stopped. At my annual checkup, the doctor asked how much I drank. I said I was a social drinker. “Meaning what?” he asked. “You have one or two drinks a week?”
“Well, no,” I said. “I have 15 or 20 a day.” I date my recovery to the look he gave me. At that moment, I became one of the five percent of alcoholics (32,000 people in Canada) who, in a given year, simply quit drinking. It took one step, not 12. That was five years ago.
Could a 12-step program have saved the old fellow with the DTs? Doubtful. Could anything? Recovery from alcoholism depends primarily on personal motivation. He obviously didn’t have it, and no one could have forced it on him. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I still remember the look he gave me in the last moments of his life. Like my doctor’s expression, it has stayed with me and helped me stay sober. He may be gone but, as long as I’m around, he will never be anonymous.
Source: New Recovery February 26, 2007
