anonymous, bill wilson. joining me now, dr. robbie ludwig, and gabby glazer who wrote that provocative piece. great to have you both here. thank you. i thought the piece was fascinating. there s some parallel reporting that s gone on about heroin addiction. what s the general thrust here? the general thrust is that we don t know we don t have numbers for how aa works. we have anecdotal evidence for it, which is the narrative that it worked for your uncle, it worked for your grandfather, therefore, it works. but we don t actually have a success rate. we don t have aa anonymous. it doesn t it s not studied by academic institutions, because it is anonymous. we don t have randomly controlled double blind science behind it. we just don t know as empirical testing what the success rate is and how the success rate might stack up against alternative forms of treatment. the best guess is that it s
the co-founder of alcoholics anonymous, bill wilson. great to have you both here. thank you. i thought the piece was fascinating. there s some parallel reporting that s gone on about heroin addiction. what s the general thrust here? the general thrust is that we don t know we don t have numbers for how aa works. we have anecdotal evidence for it which is the narrative that it worked for your uncle, it worked for your grandfather, therefore, it works. but we don t actually have a success rate. we don t have aa anonymous. it doesn t it s not studied by academic institutions because it is anonymous. we don t have randomly controlled double blind science behind it. we just don t know as empirical testing what the success rate is and how the success rate might stack up against alternative forms of
behind it. we just don t know as empirical testing what the success rate is and how the success rate might stack up against alternative forms of treatment. the best guess is that it s in the single digits, under 10%. my understanding is that also the best guess for other alternatives is also rather low. the baseline that we re dealing with when we re talking about people in the groups of addiction, whether that s alcohol specifically or narcotics and other drugs, is we re dealing with relatively low success rates. the question is, how do you define success. exactly. aa defines success with ab sti nance. that s the metric, that s the yardstick. a lot of people have a really hard time to keep to that. what s your feeling about this? i think it is a very dangerous to put out the idea that aa doesn t work. does it work for everybody? no. there s not going to be one form of treatment that works for everybody. and also, there are many people in aa, and i treat many of them, who n