Are you sure about that? A 2-5% success rate isn’t very good. A 10% success rate wouldn’t be very good. A 25% success rate wouldn’t be much better. It seems that AA doesn’t really effect whether a person is going to stay sober or not.
Even the most ardent true believers who will be honest about it recognize that A.A. and N.A. have at least 90% failure rates. And the real numbers are more like 95% or 98% or 100% failure rates. It depends on who is doing the counting, how they are counting, and what they are counting or measuring.
An extensive study (Hester and Miller, Handbook of alcoholism treatment approaches) shows that peer-based 12-step alcohol treatment programs do NOT have a higher success rate than no treatment at all. Facilitated 12-step treatment (trained facilitators guiding subjects through the twelve-step process) were marginally better. “The two tests of AA found it inferior to other treatments or even no treatment but were not sufficient to rank AA reliably.”
In terms of new-member dropout rate, all five surveys were in close agreement. According to the “Comments” document, the “% of those coming to AA within the first year that have remained the indicated number of months” is 19% after one month; 10% after three months; and 5% after 12 months.xii In other words, AA has a 95% new-member dropout rate during the first year of attendance.
If success is defined as one-year’s sobriety, on the face of it this 95% dropout rate gives AA a maximum success rate of only 5%; and a great many new members do not remain continuously sober during their first year in AA, which causes the apparent AA success rate to fall even lower.
People in AA have the same success rate as those not in AA.