AA is not a cult. Calling it a cult is a low effort way to make it seem bad. And it’s completely ineffective in expressing its toxic culture and practices because ‘cult’ is such a loaded word. Make no mistake, AA is worse than a cult. Cults are small, insular and secretive. AA is large, operates in the open and its dangerous aspects are not readily obvious until one is very familiar with the organization. AA is more like religious extremism.

Cults are insular and secretive. AA is inclusive and open. But not open in the sense that they broadcast their beliefs. More like they are open in the sense that they operate by a tacit ‘security through obscurity’ motto to crib a phrase from the network security world. Their major beliefs are freely available to anyone interested. The problem as I see it is how few people are interested.

Scientology, on the other hand, is a cult religion that operates in the open to an extent and hasn’t shed their cult tactics. They also obscure their beliefs through litigation, copyright enforcement and outright violence and abuse directed at dissenters who aim criticism at the organization. This is not quite the case with AA. They employ some of these tactics but at an individual level rather than an institutional level. They are open about their beliefs and central, institutional practices so they don’t qualify as a cult on the point of being secretive. But like Scientology which obscures scrutiny by remaining relatively small and hiding its kookier beliefs through multiple layers that tend to revolve around legal maneuvering, AA seeks respectability through an air of openness. A foggy, opaque air.

They maintain their toxicity beneath the radar of most anyone unaffected by them relatively easily through their narrow scope. The average person will never gain an in depth knowledge of AA without direct experience. There’s no incentive to investigate them independently unless they’ve been personally affected by them. That personal affectation tends towards knowing someone in the program. And if one is a member openly then that person can safely be assumed to have nothing but glowing praise. The program does work. According to their own self reporting, it works overwhelmingly for white men. It’s a boys’ club culture and that’s part of the problem as well.

AA is program that has built itself into a cultural institution synonymous with recovery from addiction so it’s all too easy to assign the blame for any failure in recovery to an individual rather than the institution involved. Even the word ‘Anonymous’ and its truncated variations when applied to addiction recovery are so ingrained in the public consciousness that Scientology has its own addiction group therapy arm called Narcanon 9emphasis my own).

AA goes unquestioned every day. It’s held as infallible by an apathetic public due only to its proliferation, ubiquity and public indifference to the problem it seeks to solve. This is a public opinion Alcoholics Anonymous helped shape by being an organization launched to public attention by harnessing the zeitgeist of mid 1930s America and blind luck.

The AA program as written has few secrets. It’s out there. The AA experience for people in the program has multiple layers of secrets. And the information about them isn’t obscure. There are whistleblowers. Public opinion on the subject was settled long ago and it broke along lines favorable to AA because they were pioneers. Not because they were effective at keeping anyone from dying from addiction. In fact, it’s a program that fuels itself on suffering.

There’s a 12 Step concept, not a codified concept mind you, called the “gift of desperation.” To put it bluntly it means that an alcoholic has been brought so low by the pain and suffering of addiction that he will seek comfort at any port. AA is the port and they bank on this to the point that they gaslight members into truly believing that all of their suffering was for the noble purpose of bringing them into the rooms of AA. And AA is the last available option before “jails, institutions and death,” as they put it. It is a wholly noble program after enough gaslighting. Most people don’t buy this on the first go-round. It’s a difficult concept and one based on blind devotion. So this tool in the AA playbook kills people indirectly as 12 Step is applied to an opioid problem where second chances are wholly randomized.

Not only does this kill people through reliance on blind faith, a belief that people who want help will make it to help before they die, and if they do die, that’s God’s will, but desperate people are easy targets to be exploited. Sexual exploitation happens in the rooms of AA every day. It has a nickname: “The 13th Step.” Wherein a person with more experience will target newcomers to prey on them at their moment of weakness by seeming to offer genuine help but actually being motivated by sex. Or rape.

AA has an open door policy of sorts. And the United States government has a war on drugs,” zero tolerance for DUI, We can’t help these people as an institution policy so the courts send people to AA every day as part of plea deals. First offender for a violent offense? Alcohol was involved? Plea deal with AA as a stipulation. Parolee for any number of crimes where alcohol or drugs were a factor? Mandatory 12 Step meetings. This is not to say that the courts are flooding the rooms of 12 Step groups with violent rapists and murderers, those situations do happen but not at epidemic levels, however the problem is the structure of AA defers all responsibility for actions of members and the Alcoholics Anonymous World Service authority defers all responsibility for groups. So what happens is criminals of all varieties are coerced into a loose system of unaffiliated groups that have no responsibility other than personal responsibility and the result is that the problems to do not become evident until they are crimes which are reported to the police. After the fact. The structure that set this all up, whether it be someone sent from court who kills someone he meets at a meeting or just some opportunistic asshole who takes advantage of a newcomer, this mechanism that incubates and hides criminal behavior has deniability for the entire chain of events built into its structure.

12 Step was not created with the reality that one lapse in judgement could end a person’s life. It was created to help alcoholics, yet AA and other 12 Step programs allow these principles to be applied to life/death black/white reality of the modern opioid epidemic where heroin is cut with fetanyl and fetanyl is sold as heroin and fetanyl can induce overdose through skin contact by a person with no tolerance.

12 Step doesn’t work. At least not as well as it should. There’s an institutional disregard for the seriousness of the opiate epidemic that comes from the history of a program that was begun to help people with an addiction that kills slowly. It didn’t work to a high degree at its inception, it continues not to work and now that it’s being widely applied to problems it has no business applying itself to, it’s killing people with an ineptitude disregards the reality of modern drug addiction, modern psychology and an arrogant belief that these 80 year-old precepts are infallible.

12 step was myopic from it’s start and dangerous at this point. It claims to be spiritual rather than religious but it’s absolutely a religion in its own right, and failing that, so deeply patterned on Christianity that the two are nearly inseparable. But it’s not a cult. It’s faith healing, plain and simple. And as it stands it’s a toxic culture that needs sunlight shone on it to drive out the rot.