I don't claim to know a lot about addiction to alcohol or drugs, since I don't drink, smoke or take drugs (unless prescribed). Of course, I am addicted to coffee and caffeine... and naps. Anyway, one thing that really frustrates me as a godless heathen, is how the only game in town for people who want to overcome their addiction to alcohol or drugs is AA or NA, which are heavily religious and not really based on scientific research.The main idea behind AA/NA is that you admit you are helpless over your addiction and must turn your life over to a higher power. If you have a problem and end up getting pulled over for drunk driving or caught with drugs, you can end up being court-mandated to go to AA/NA. So if you're an atheist you still have to go and "work the program" and give your life over and admit you are powerless. If you fight it though, the court can't force you to go to AA, because even though "it's not deemed a religion, it contains enough religious components to make coerced attendance at AA meetings a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the constitution".
And then there are the studies done about the effectiveness of AA/NA. The results so far have been inconsistent. AA, which has been around since about 1939 (when the Alcoholics Anonymous book was published) and now has 1,867,212 members and 106,202 AA groups worldwide, still can't produce conclusive studies that show it works.
So far in the research that has been done, the participants have been self selected. So no randomized double blinded trials exist. I don't know how they would be able to do that, but certainly it shows a huge limitation that everyone is self selected. A Cochrane Review of 8 studies published between 1967 and 2005, measuring the effectiveness of AA, found "no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA" in treating alcoholism, based on a meta-analysis of the results of eight trials involving a total of 3,417 individuals. To determine further the effectiveness of AA, the authors suggested that more studies comparing treatment outcomes with control groups were necessary.
Also, most people who start AA drop out, 95% according to AA's own surveys. But there really hasn't been much of an alternative. Until recently.
Now there's Lifering Secular Recovery. Here are some facts about Lifering:
