THE PROBLEM · PART TWO
Everyone was losing this fight — for centuries.
IN PLAIN WORDS
A history of struggle.
Before it was a disease, it was a disgrace. For most of history, the drunkard was a moral failure — weak-willed, sinful, shameful — and the treatments matched the theory: sermons, pledges, punishment, prayer delivered like a verdict. In the 1840s, a movement of reformed drinkers called the Washingtonians swept America — meetings, testimony, mutual aid, hundreds of thousands of members — and within a generation it had all but vanished, pulled apart by politics and causes far from its purpose.
The asylum era followed: "inebriate homes" where drinkers dried out, walked out, and drank again. Then the cure-sellers — injections, tonics, and secret formulas sold by mail, gold cures and miracle powders, hope by mail order. Doctors of the era were often the most honest of all: many admitted, privately and in print, that medicine had almost nothing that worked.
That's the field as it stood in 1935, when a failed stockbroker with a few months dry met a surgeon who couldn't stop — in Akron, Ohio — and instead of a sermon or a cure, one drunk simply told another the truth about himself. What grew from that conversation didn't defeat the problem. It found a way to live beyond it, one day at a time — and it started by admitting everything this page describes: that the fight, fought the old ways, kept being lost.
BILL'S STORY · BIG BOOK, PP. 1–16
Myths worth clearing up
“People back then just didn't try hard enough.”
They took lifetime pledges in front of their churches. They committed themselves to asylums. They drank the gold cure. Effort was never the missing ingredient.
“Science eventually cured it.”
Science eventually described it — which mattered enormously. But no pill has ever removed the obsession. The honest doctors said so then; the honest ones say so now.
“AA appeared out of nowhere.”
It appeared out of a century of failure — and learned from it. Meetings, testimony, one drunk helping another: the Washingtonians had the seed. AA added the steps, and kept its purpose singular.
WHAT THE BOOK SAYS
The doctor who wrote the book's introduction was blunt about his own field: medicine, he admitted, had done what it could and largely failed — the moral and medical resources of the era, thrown at this problem for generations, hadn't been enough. It's a rare thing, a doctor's introduction admitting the doctors didn't have the answer. That honesty is part of why the book that follows had to try something else.
The Doctor's Opinion · Big Book, pp. xxv–xxxii (paraphrased)
From the literature
If this is the problem, willpower was never going to be the tool. What worked is one page over.
Begin with Step One →