Does court-ordered attendance undermine the effectiveness of organisations like AA?

Great Debates
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The OP asked if court ordered AA attendees reduced the effectiveness of AA. My answer is I don’t think so, at least not for me. The thread has turned into a question of whether court mandated attendance helps the offender, but you know I don’t care about that. There are lots of drunks out there and AA can’t even come close to handling all of them. Allegorically I give the scroungers’ cry, “I got mine!” and that’s what’s important to me. It’s a selfish program in that * my* part in AA is to stay sober and show that it is possible. If someone can get some benefit from that, fine. If not then maybe someone else’s method will work. Or maybe no method will work for some, and that seems to be not uncommon.

As I said, my experience is that there is a percentage, which is too small be a wide margin, who get sober and stay that way. Then there are those, and there are too many of them, who drift in and out and never do get it. Many of them are just as angry and resentful as the court mandated attendees but they don’t reduce AA effectiveness for those for whom it works. That’s hard for people to get. AA is a self help method. You find, by sampling from the experience of those who succeed or by any other method, something that works for you and stick with it. The meetings are just a method of constant reinforcement of what it can be like to be a drunk, because there are always plenty of confused and angry people around to give a demonstration.

I realize that this merely says * AA works for those for whom it works* but that’s the way I see it. Some say that those who have conquered alcoholism are smug about it. Well, everyone deserves the chance to be smug about something. The only thing some people have to be smug about is that their grandfather lucked into a lot of money.

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—I realize that this merely says AA works for those for whom it works but that’s the way I see it.—

Nothing wrong with that.

I agree with the court decision on AA being a religious program, and hence not something one should be compelled to attend by state action, no matter how disreputable or criminal the individual in question.

It’s extremely difficult to generalize about the effectiveness of AA, given the subjective nature of whether a person is “really” comitted to getting sober, not to mention the very contentious definition of alcoholism itself (a majority of people who described themselves as alcoholics report recovering without any form of treatment: are these people “really” alcoholics? Is defining them out of the picture just a way to bias theories of addiction in general?).
AA has been a solid part of the lives of people who have gotten sober, their road to new lives free from drinking. AA has also spawned its own share of horror stories from people who found its ideas to work against their sobriety instead of for it.
Overcomming addiction is an extremely mental activity: it relies on beliefs, values, dedication- and it stands to reasons that particular beliefs are not going to wokr very well for some people, and amazingly well for others: different keys, sometimes even multiple keys, for different locks. In a perfect world, the state would offer AA along with alternatives.

Unfortunately, there are not many other programs available on the cheap, and the state is not going to take the word of a DUI that they are following a individual program. This creates a pretty difficult situation. I don’t know if there is any simple solution available.